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Leighton Cake
1 pint butter. 1 pint cream. 2 pints sugar. 4 pints flour. 2 teaspoonfuls essence of almonds. The whites of 12 eggs. 2 teaspoonfuls yeast powder, mixed in flour.--Mrs. N.
A very large white cake given as a bare ingredient list, in the shorthand of a book written for cooks who already knew what to do with it. The proportions are sound; everything else has to be supplied.
- The measures are by volume, and they are bigA pint is 2 cups: 2 cups (1 lb) butter, 2 cups cream, 4 cups sugar, 8 cups flour. That is a batter of six pounds or more, enough for two large tube pans or a stack of 9-inch layers. Halving it is reasonable.
- Yeast powder is baking powderA common Southern term of the period for a chemical leavener, whether bought ready-mixed or made up at home from soda and cream of tartar. Two teaspoons for 8 cups of flour is far less than modern practice, so the cake depends heavily on the egg whites for lift.
- Beat the whites separatelyNothing in the list says so, but with this little baking powder the whites must be whipped to soft, glossy peaks and folded in last. Stirred in slack, the cake will be heavy and close-grained.
- Assembly orderCream the butter and sugar until pale, alternate the flour (with the baking powder sifted through it) and the cream, add the almond essence, then fold in the whites.
- No oven is specifiedA cake of this size wants a moderate oven, 325-350F, for about an hour to an hour and a quarter in a deep pan; layers will take 25-35 minutes. Test with a skewer at the centre.
- Essence of almondsPeriod essences were often based on bitter almond oil and were considerably stronger than today's bottled almond extract. Two teaspoons of modern extract in this volume is about right; if you are working from a half batch, start with one.
- CreamNineteenth-century cream was not standardised. Heavy cream gives a rich, tight crumb; whole milk or half-and-half makes a lighter cake closer to what most readers would expect from a white cake.
- YieldAround 20 to 24 servings at full size. Books of this kind are full of yolk-heavy recipes -- custards, boiled dressing, gold cake -- so the dozen leftover yolks would not have gone to waste.
Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1878), compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree, was assembled from contributions by some 250 Virginia housekeepers, which is why so many of its recipes end with an initial rather than a name -- "Mrs. N." would have been known to the editor and to her neighbours, and to nobody since. Cakes like this one, named for something other than anything in the bowl, were the standard currency of that kind of exchange: the recipe travelled, the name stuck, and the method was left out because every cook receiving it already had it in her hands. The heavy reliance on a dozen egg whites places it in the long line of white or "silver" cakes that became fashionable once beaten whites and, later, packaged baking powder made a pale fine-grained crumb achievable at home; "yeast powder" in Southern books of this period almost always means baking powder, which was still new enough to be described by what it replaced.