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Snow Mountain Cake
1 cup of butter. 3 cups of sugar, creamed together. 1 cup of sweet cream. 1 teaspoonful cream of tartar and 1/2 teaspoon of soda, sprinkled in 3 1/2 cups of sifted flour. Whites of 10 eggs.
Bake in thin cakes as for jelly cakes. Ice and sprinkle each layer with grated cocoanut.
Take the whites of three eggs for the icing, and grate one cocoanut.-Mrs.
A white layer cake built on ten egg whites and chemical leavening, baked in thin sheets and stacked with coconut. The original assumes you know how a jelly cake is handled, so the pan size, temperature and time all have to be supplied.
- The hinge: fold, don't beatThe whites are the only lift this cake has beyond a modest amount of soda and cream of tartar. Beat them to soft, glossy peaks and fold them into the batter in three additions, stopping while a few streaks remain rather than mixing to smoothness.
- "Sweet cream"Unsweetened fresh cream, not soured or cultured. Heavy or whipping cream is the closest modern equivalent; it is used liquid, not whipped.
- Cream of tartar and sodaTogether these are essentially homemade baking powder. A teaspoon of cream of tartar with half a teaspoon of soda is roughly equivalent to about 2 teaspoons of modern baking powder if you prefer to substitute.
- "Thin cakes as for jelly cakes"Jelly-cake tins were shallow rounds, 8 or 9 inches across, filled about half an inch deep. This quantity of batter gives four to five such layers. Bake at 375F for 12 to 15 minutes, until the surface springs back and the edges just begin to color.
- Ten egg whitesAbout 1 1/4 cups, or 300 g. Weigh rather than count if your eggs are large; too much white makes the crumb dry and rubbery.
- Raw-egg icingThe icing is uncooked whites beaten with sugar and left to set in air, which was normal practice and is not now. Use pasteurized whites, or make a boiled icing or Swiss meringue, if the cake is for children, the elderly or anyone pregnant.
- One cocoanutA whole fresh coconut yields roughly 3 to 4 cups grated. Unsweetened desiccated or frozen grated coconut substitutes directly; sweetened flaked coconut will make an already very sweet cake cloying.
- SugarThree cups of sugar to 3 1/2 cups of flour is high by modern standards and the cake will be sweet and tender-crumbed. Cutting to 2 1/2 cups still works, though the layers brown less.
- YieldA four- or five-layer cake serving 12 to 16. Assembled cakes with a soft egg-white icing are best eaten the day they are made; the coconut draws moisture and the icing weeps by the second day.
Snow cakes, mountain cakes and "snow mountain" cakes crowd the baking chapters of late nineteenth-century American cookbooks, and they all trade on the same effect: a batter made pale by using only egg whites, stacked high and covered in white icing and white coconut. Cakes of this kind were made easier on this scale once cream of tartar and soda were cheap and reliable household goods, letting a cook raise a cake without relying on yeast or on beaten whole eggs alone, though cakes raised on beaten whites alone predate reliable chemical leavening; the surplus yolks went into custards, curds and gold cake, and one often notices yolk-heavy recipes sitting a page or two away. Coconut was the luxury note. It arrived in Southern ports as whole nuts from the Caribbean trade and had to be cracked, pared and grated by hand, so a cake calling for a whole coconut plus ten eggs and a cup of butter was company food. Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1879), compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree from contributions by named Virginia housekeepers, is full of such recipes credited to particular women, written in the shorthand of cooks who already knew what a jelly-cake tin looked like.