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Filling for Jelly Cake
Whites of two eggs, beaten to a froth. 2 cupfuls of sugar. Juice and grated peel of 2 oranges.
Put this between the layers, and on top the cakes.--Mrs. C. C. Oranges cut fine, and sweetened and mixed with grated cocoanut, also chocolate, is used for filling jelly cake. Sponge cake is better than the soda recipe.--Mrs. C. C.
This is an uncooked meringue-style filling: raw egg white beaten with sugar and citrus, spread between cake layers and left to stand. Nothing in the process heats the eggs, and the finished cake is meant to sit for hours or days.
- Raw egg white, never cookedThe whites are beaten and used as-is. Salmonella can be carried on the shell and may also be present inside the egg, and a cake filling is never brought anywhere near 160F, the temperature USDA gives for cooking egg dishes safely (commercial pasteurization uses lower temperatures held longer). Use a current recipe built on pasteurized whites or a cooked meringue instead.
- Sugar and acid do not sterilize itSugar and acid should not be relied on -- Two cups of sugar and the juice of two oranges look like preservatives, but the juice adds liquid back, and there is no basis for assuming a soft cake filling dries down far enough to stop bacterial growth. Orange juice is not acidic enough to be counted on either.
- It is designed to sit at room temperatureIt would have been held at room temperature -- The recipe gives no storage instruction, and in 1877 a filled cake would have been kept unrefrigerated. That is the holding condition that turns a small dose of bacteria into a large one.
- "Jelly cake" is not made with jelly"Jelly cake" did not always mean jelly -- The name usually described thin cake layers spread with jelly, but in nineteenth-century American usage it was also applied to the format whatever the filling — fruit, custard or, as here, a raw meringue, as this recipe's title shows.
- Mrs. C. C.'s note on the cake itselfThe comparison is between a sponge cake, raised on beaten eggs, and a "soda recipe" leavened with saleratus or baking soda. She gives no reason for preferring the sponge.
- The variationsThe alternatives she lists — sweetened chopped orange with grated coconut, or chocolate — read as separate fillings, not additions to the meringue. Those carry no raw-egg problem, though "grated cocoanut" most likely means fresh coconut grated from the nut, considerably wetter and less sweet than packaged sweetened flake.
Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1877), compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree from contributions credited to some 250 Virginia housekeepers, is typical of the subscription community cookbook: recipes arrive as initials and brief notes, with the same contributor sometimes offering three ways to do a thing in a single breath, as Mrs. C. C. does here. Layered "jelly cakes" were a common American company cake in this period. The oranges are worth noticing: by the 1870s Florida and imported West Indian fruit reached Virginia tables, though citrus still read as something of a luxury in a cake.