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Pineapple, or Orange Cake
1 cup of butter. 3 cups sugar. 5 eggs, beaten separately. 3 1/2 cups sweet milk. 2 teaspoonfuls cream of tartar. 1 teaspoonful soda. Bake in jelly-cake tins, four or five deep. Have ready a thick icing, which put on the cakes as thickly as will stick; spread thickly on that the grated pineapple, or orange, the icing to be flavored with the juice of the fruit and a little tartaric acid.--Mrs. C. C.
A five-layer butter cake with a fruit-and-icing filling, printed with one glaring omission: there is no flour in the ingredient list. Anyone working from this page has to supply it.
- The missing flourA batter of this size — 1 cup butter, 3 cups sugar, 5 eggs — would need roughly 4 to 5 cups of sifted flour. A dropped line in setting the type is the likeliest explanation, since cream of tartar and soda in these proportions belong to a flour batter.
- The milk is suspect too3 1/2 cups of milk against 1 cup of butter would give a batter close to pancake consistency. Treat the figure as unreliable rather than converting it faithfully.
- Jelly-cake tinsShallow round tins, 8 or 9 inches across and about an inch deep, used for thin layers meant to be stacked with filling. Modern 8-inch round pans work; fill them only about a third full to get layers this thin.
- Cream of tartar and sodaTogether these are homemade baking powder — 2 teaspoons cream of tartar to 1 teaspoon soda works out to roughly 4 teaspoons of modern baking powder. Sift them with the flour and get the pans into the oven promptly, since the reaction begins as soon as the batter is wet.
- OvenNo temperature is given because the book assumes a wood range judged by hand. Thin layers want 350–375F and will be done in 12 to 18 minutes, when the centre springs back.
- Thick icingThe recipe specifies only "a thick icing." Most likely intended is the period's uncooked confectioners' icing: beaten egg white worked with sifted sugar until it holds a stiff mass. If so, it contains raw egg. If that matters in your household, use pasteurized whites or a cooked meringue icing instead.
- Tartaric acidSold at the druggist in the nineteenth century as a souring agent and still available as a powder. Its job here is to sharpen the fruit and keep the icing from tasting merely sweet; a scant 1/4 teaspoon is plenty, and lemon juice does much the same work.
- Grated pineappleFresh pineapple is full of bromelain, which digests protein and will slowly slacken an egg-white icing, so assemble the cake near serving time. Canned crushed pineapple, well drained, has been heated enough to destroy the enzyme and holds up for a day or two.
- YieldFour or five thin layers, roughly 12 to 16 servings. It is a cake for a table, not a small household.
Housekeeping in Old Virginia, compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree and published in the late 1870s, was assembled from contributions by Virginia housekeepers, credited variously by name and by initials — hence the "Mrs. C. C." at the end. The tall stack of thin layers filled with fruit and icing is characteristic of American cake baking in the decades after chemical leavening became cheap and reliable: cream of tartar and soda replaced hours of egg-beating, and the shallow "jelly-cake tin" made a showy dessert out of a single ordinary batter. Pineapple, shipped from the Caribbean and by the 1870s increasingly available tinned, still carried something of a luxury association.