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Rose or Clouded Cake
12 eggs, leaving out the whites of 3. 1 pound flour. 1 pound sugar. 3/4 pound butter. 2 small teaspoonfuls cream tartar. 2 small teaspoonfuls powdered alum. 1 small teaspoonful soda. 2 small teaspoonfuls cochineal, dissolved in 1/3 cupful boiling water.
Having dissolved the alum, soda, and cream tartar, mix with the cochineal. Stir these ingredients in nearly one-third of the batter. Our into the cake mould a layer of white batter, and a layer of red batter, alternately, beginning and ending with white; three layers of white and two of red. This is an ornamental cake to cut for baskets.
A marbled pound cake from a period when bakers reached for the dyer's shelf to colour their food. The colouring method is the problem, and it is not one that can be adjusted around.
- The alum is the reason to stopTwo small teaspoonfuls of powdered alum is on the order of 8-10 grams of potassium aluminium sulfate. Alum is acidic and will react with soda, so some leavening effect is possible, but it is introduced here with the dye, and alum was the standard mordant for fixing cochineal, which makes a colour-fixing role the likely intent. Alum in gram quantities is a strong astringent and irritant to the stomach; it was used medicinally as an emetic in the same century that produced this book. Pickling alum still exists, but the culinary dose is a fraction of a teaspoon in a crock of brine, not two spoonfuls in a single cake.
- Why the soda and cream of tartar do not fix itThe formula reads like a home-mixed baking powder, and alum is not out of place in one; alum-based baking powders were sold in this period. But the soda and cream of tartar already form a complete acid-base pair, and the alum is dissolved and stirred in with the dye into only a third of the batter, which concentrates it in the red layers rather than distributing it through the cake.
- CochinealCochineal itself is not the hazard. It is a genuine insect-derived dye, still sold as carmine, and it remains a permitted food colour. Home cooks of the period bought it as a powder or a tincture from the druggist, which is why it arrives here alongside alum — both were shelf-stock for dyeing as much as for cooking.
- If you want the effectA red-and-white layered or marbled butter cake is easy enough to find in a current recipe using food colouring alone. Use one.
- "To cut for baskets"Not a baking instruction. Nineteenth-century entertaining called for cake cut into small pieces and piled in a cake basket on the table, so the point of the alternating layers was the cut face, which showed red and white stripes on every slice.
Housekeeping in Old Virginia, compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree and published in 1878, gathered contributions from Virginia households, and its cake chapter is a fair record of what an ambitious hostess was expected to produce: pound cakes by the pound, in the literal sense, with a dozen eggs. Coloured and marbled cakes were fashionable through the second half of the century, and the red often came from cochineal, the dried bodies of a scale insect farmed in Mexico and Central America and traded worldwide since the Spanish colonial period. Fixing that dye with alum was standard practice in textile dyeing, and the two were sold side by side, so the leap to fixing it in a cake batter was a short one for a cook who thought of colour as a dyer's problem. It is a useful reminder that the line between the pantry and the chemist's counter was thinner then, and that a good many household ingredients of the 1870s were adopted without much sense of dose.