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Mountain Ash Cake
The whites of 8 eggs. 1 cup of butter. 2 cups of sugar. 3 cups of flour. 1/2 cup of sweet milk. 1/2 teaspoonful of soda. 1 teaspoonful cream of tartar. Mix all the ingredients well, and flavor with lemon. Bake in shallow pans; ice each cake separately and cover with jelly, then form a large cake and ice over.-Mrs. P.
A white layer cake of the 1870s, leavened with soda and cream of tartar rather than baking powder. The instructions assume a cook who already knows how to cream butter and fold whites, so the method needs filling in.
- Creaming orderCream the butter and sugar first, then add the milk and flour alternately, and fold the beaten whites in last. Mixing "all the ingredients well" at once, as written, will knock the air out of the whites and give a dense crumb.
- Soda and cream of tartarHalf a teaspoon of soda with a teaspoon of cream of tartar is roughly the equivalent of two teaspoons of baking powder. Sift the cream of tartar with the flour and dissolve the soda in the milk, since the two react as soon as they meet in liquid; get the batter into the oven promptly.
- Sweet milkSimply fresh unsoured milk, as distinct from the buttermilk or clabber a nineteenth-century kitchen also had on hand. Whole milk is the right substitute.
- Cups and butterTaking a cup as 8 fluid ounces, one cup of butter is two sticks, or 8 oz; period cup measures were not standardized, so treat the equivalence as an approximation. Flour was scooped and unsifted-measure by weight if you can, around 12 to 13 oz for the three cups.
- OvenShallow layers of this size bake well at around 350F for 20 to 25 minutes. The recipe gives no temperature at all, as it predates oven thermostats.
- "Shallow pans"Three or four 8- or 9-inch round layers. The batter is about the volume of a standard two-layer cake plus half again.
- Flavored with lemonPeriod lemon flavoring means either lemon extract-about a teaspoon-or grated zest. Zest gives a better flavor but flecks the white crumb, which the original cook was probably trying to keep pale.
- The assemblyEach layer is iced on its own, spread with jelly (currant or quince would suit), then stacked and the whole thing iced over. Let the layers cool completely or the icing will slide.
- YieldOne tall layer cake serving 12 to 16.
Housekeeping in Old Virginia, edited by Marion Cabell Tyree and published in 1878, is a compilation of contributions from some 250 Virginia housekeepers, which is why so many of its recipes end in an initial rather than a name-"Mrs. P." is one such credit. The book belongs to the great age of American white cakes, when a batter made only with the whites was a small display of prosperity: it meant eight yolks to be used elsewhere. The soda-and-cream-of-tartar pairing dates the recipe as well; commercial baking powder was available by the 1870s but some cooks combined the acid and the alkali themselves. The name is unexplained in the source and probably refers to the mountain ash, or rowan, a decorative tree with clustered white blossom-though names like this were also simply borrowed from a neighbor, a place, or a fashion of the moment.