Custard Cake
1/2 cupful butter. 2 cupfuls sugar. 7 eggs, leaving out 4 yolks. 3 cupfuls flour. 1 cupful of milk 2 teaspoonfuls baking powder. Bake in shallow pans. For the custard: one quart of milk, let come to a boil, sweeten it; take the four yolks and three tablespoonfuls of cornstarch, mix with a little of the milk cold, and then stir it gradually into the boiling milk, and continue to stir until done. Add a piece of butter the size of a walnut; flavor with vanilla, and put between the cakes.--Mrs. C. B.
— Mrs. Galt'S Cake
Whites of 13 eggs, yolks of 3. 3/4 pound of butter. 1 pound of flour. 1 pound of sugar. Season to taste.--Miss E. T.
Two contributed cakes run together here: a layer cake with a cornstarch pastry-cream filling, and a plain pound-style cake given only as a list of weights. Both assume a cook who already knows the creaming method, so the technique has to be supplied from experience.
- The hinge: cook the custard past the boilCornstarch does not thicken properly, and tastes chalky, until the mixture actually bubbles. Once the slurry goes into the hot milk, keep stirring and let it boil for a full minute or two before pulling it off. This also takes the yolks well past a safe temperature.
- Egg arithmetic"7 eggs, leaving out 4 yolks" means 7 whites and 3 yolks go into the batter; the 4 reserved yolks are what thickens the custard. Eggs of the period were less standardised than today's graded large egg and often ran smaller, so the batter may be on the generous side with modern eggs.
- Cupfuls and the walnutA cupful in cookery of this period is generally a half-pint, close enough to a modern 8 oz cup. Butter "the size of a walnut" is usually reckoned at about 1 tablespoon.
- Oven and pansShallow pans means layers: three 9-inch rounds, buttered and floured, at 350F for roughly 25 minutes. The recipe gives no oven direction, so the temperature has to be supplied.
- Sweeten it — how muchNo quantity is given for the custard sugar. For a quart of milk, 1/2 to 3/4 cup is in the right range; less if the cake layers are already very sweet. A quart also makes far more filling than three layers need, so consider halving the custard.
- Baking powderCommercial baking powders of the period varied in strength. Two teaspoons to three cups of flour is slightly light by modern standards; 3 to 3 1/2 teaspoons of a current double-acting powder gives the lift the recipe expects.
- Assembly and keepingFill only when both cake and custard are completely cold, or the filling will slide. A cake filled with egg-and-milk pastry cream is perishable: refrigerate it and eat within two days.
- Mrs. Galt's CakeThis second entry is a pound cake in all but name — equal pounds of flour and sugar, 12 oz butter, and no leavening at all, so beaten whites are the only available lift. Cream butter and sugar hard, fold the beaten whites in last, and bake slow, around 300-325F, in a deep tube pan for well over an hour. "Season to taste" is left entirely to the cook; spice, rosewater or brandy would all suit.
- YieldThe custard cake gives a three-layer 9-inch cake, 12 to 16 slices. Mrs. Galt's cake, at roughly four pounds of batter, needs a 10-inch tube pan and serves about 20.
Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1879), compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree, was assembled from contributions by named Virginia housekeepers, which is why so many entries close with initials like "Mrs. C. B." and "Miss E. T." It is a record of a particular social circle rather than a single author's method. A cake split and filled with boiled cornstarch custard appears to have been a fashionable American form by the 1870s, made practical by the spread of manufactured cornstarch, which gave home cooks a cheap, reliable thickener that needed fewer yolks than a true crème pâtissière; much the same idea is often said to underlie what New England kitchens were calling Boston cream pie. The pairing on this page is also telling: the custard cake, leavened with the new baking powder, sits directly beside Mrs. Galt's cake, which looks back to what is generally traced to eighteenth-century practice — pounds of butter, sugar and flour, and thirteen egg whites to do all the lifting.