Lady Cake
1 pound sugar. 1/2 pound of flour. 6 ounces of butter. The whites of 14 eggs. Season with two drops oil of bitter almond.-Miss S.
Lady Cake.
The whites of 8 eggs, beaten to a froth. 3 cups flour. 2 cups of sugar. 1 cup of butter, creamed with the sugar. 1 teaspoonful cream of tartar in the flour. 1/2 teaspoonful of soda in 1/2 cup sweet milk.
Beat all together, and bake in a mould or small pans. Season to taste. A little whisky or rum improves cake of all kinds.--Mrs. Dr. C.
Two contributors' versions of the same white cake, printed back to back. The second is an ordinary butter cake; the first is flavored with a substance that has no place in a modern kitchen.
- Oil of bitter almondThe flavoring called for in Miss S.'s version is bitter almond oil. In the nineteenth century this was sold both unrectified, carrying free hydrogen cyanide, and rectified with the prussic acid removed, and the recipe does not say which is meant. There is no way to judge the strength of anything sold today under a similar name. Use a current recipe if you want an almond-scented white cake.
- Not the same as almond extractModern almond extract is benzaldehyde, either synthetic or distilled and washed free of prussic acid, and it is sold at a fixed dilution. It is not what this recipe means, and reading the old instruction as though it were is the mistake to avoid.
- The second version's proportionsMrs. Dr. C. measures by cup: 3 cups flour, 2 cups sugar, 1 cup butter, which by modern measure is two sticks. The book does not define its cup, but the ratio is close to a modern 1-2-3 butter cake with the yolks left out.
- Cream of tartar and sodaHalf a teaspoon of soda slaked in sweet milk plus a teaspoon of cream of tartar in the flour is a homemade single-acting baking powder, roughly the lift of 2 teaspoons of modern baking powder. Keeping the acid in the dry flour and the soda in the liquid was one common way of delaying the reaction before commercial powders were trusted.
- "Beat all together"The instruction is literal: this is a beaten batter, not a folded one, despite the whites being whipped first. Expect a close, fine crumb rather than the airy result a modern white cake recipe produces by folding.
- Pans and oven"A mould or small pans" may mean a tube or other shaped mould, or small tins. The recipe gives no oven direction; by modern practice a cake of this size in a tube pan takes about 350F for 45 minutes to an hour, and small pans 20 to 25 minutes.
- The whiskyThe recipe specifies no quantity, only "a little." Spirits were commonly held to improve keeping as well as flavor, and at a spoonful or two the cake will not taste of liquor.
- Leftover yolksEight to fourteen yolks are the byproduct. Yolk-rich cakes and boiled custards were common companions to white cakes in period cookbooks, though this recipe says nothing about what to do with them.
Lady cake was the white half of a matched pair: a pale, fine-grained, almond-scented cake made with whites only, set against the dark spiced fruit cake variously called gentleman's cake, groom's cake or black cake. The two were served together at weddings and at tea tables through most of the nineteenth century, and the division of labor between whites and yolks made the pairing practical as well as decorative. Almond was often used to season the white cake, though not invariably: one of these versions reaches for it while the other leaves the choice to the cook. Housekeeping in Old Virginia, compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree and usually dated to 1878 (John P. Morton), with 1879 appearing on later printings, gathered its contents from named and initialed Virginia housewives, which accounts for two similar formulas sitting side by side.