Spice Cake
Yolks of 4 eggs. Mix 2 1/2 teaspoonfuls yeast powder in 2 1/2 cupfuls flour. 1 cupful brown sugar. 1/2 1/2 cupful syrup. 1/2 cupful butter, must be melted after being measured. Stir with the sugar 2 1/2 teaspoonfuls powdered cloves. 1 teaspoonful powdered cinnamon. 1 teaspoonful powdered allspice. The spices must be put in the flour, the syrup added after the sugar and butter are stirred together, then the eggs and milk, and lastly the flour. Mix the above alternately, in your pans, after having them buttered.--Mrs. W. CREAM CAKE. 2 cupfuls of sugar. 3 cupfuls of flour. 1/2 cupful of butter. 3 eggs. 1 cupful of sour milk. 1 teaspoonful of soda. 2 teaspoonfuls of cream tartar.
Dissolve the soda in the milk, melt the butter and add it to the eggs. Add the sugar and cream tartar to the flour. Pour it all together in shallow pans that have been well greased Bake twenty minutes.
While baking the above, get one pint of sweet milk, one cupful of sugar, one cup of flour, butter one-half size of an egg. If you use cream instead of milk, you can omit butter. Break two eggs into the sugar, beat a while, then add flour and beat thoroughly. Have the milk on the fire, and as soon as it boils, stir the mixture in it, after thinning it with some of the milk until it is like paste; cook until it is like stiff starch. Season freely with vanilla when cold, and spread it between the cakes as jelly cake is made. Grated cocoanut can be used instead, by preparing as follows: one large cocoanut grated, two pounds of loaf sugar. Pour the milk from the nut on the sugar; boil it two or three minutes, first mixing in the whites of three eggs; if not soft enough, add some sweet milk. Take it off the fire, stir in the grated cocoanut, and spread between the cakes.--Mrs. J. F. G. Cream Cake. 2 cupfuls of sugar. 1 cupful of sweet milk. 3 cupfuls of flour. 2 tablespoonfuls of butter. 4 eggs. 1/2 teaspoonful of soda. 1 teaspoonful of cream tartar.
Bake in four jelly pans.
Three cakes run together in one block of type here: a spiced butter cake and two versions of "cream cake," which in this period means a plain layer cake filled with boiled pastry cream rather than a cake containing cream. Both need some reading between the lines.
- The missing milkThe spice cake lists no quantity of milk, though the method calls for it. Judging by the flour and fat, something in the region of 1/2 to 3/4 cup is implied, but the original is genuinely silent and any figure is a guess. Add it gradually until the batter drops heavily from the spoon.
- Yeast powderA common nineteenth-century American term for baking powder, sold under various brand names, apparently so called because it raised dough without brewer's yeast. Use modern double-acting baking powder measure for measure.
- SyrupIn a Southern kitchen of this period this most likely means cane or sorghum syrup, or molasses, rather than maple. Unsulphured molasses or a light cane syrup gives the closest flavour and colour.
- That much cloveTwo and a half teaspoons of powdered cloves against one each of cinnamon and allspice is a heavy hand by modern taste. Halving it and raising the cinnamon gives a more balanced cake without changing its character.
- Sour milk and the leaveningThe first cream cake uses soda in sour milk plus cream of tartar in the flour, the older paired-leavening method, which persisted alongside packaged baking powder. Commercial buttermilk is the modern stand-in for sour milk; fresh milk soured with a tablespoon of vinegar also works.
- Jelly pans and oven heatA jelly pan is a shallow round layer tin, commonly 8 or 9 inches. The book gives no oven temperature; a moderate oven of about 350F suits these, and the twenty minutes specified fits a thin layer, while the spice cake in deeper pans will need longer.
- The boiled fillingThe pint of milk thickened with egg, sugar and flour is a pastry cream. Temper it as directed by thinning with hot milk before it goes into the pan, and cook it past the point where it tastes of raw flour, "like stiff starch." Cool it fully before the vanilla goes in or the flavour cooks off.
- The coconut fillingTwo pounds of loaf sugar to one coconut is a boiled icing in all but name. The egg whites go in before boiling, so they are cooked. Loaf sugar is refined white sugar, once sold in cones and broken up.
- The third recipeThe second Cream Cake gives ingredients and "bake in four jelly pans" and nothing else. Treat it as an alternative batter for the same assembly: cream butter and sugar, add eggs, then flour with the cream of tartar alternately with the milk holding the soda.
Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1879), compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree from contributions by some 250 Virginia women, is a community cookbook in the fullest sense, which is why the page reads as three recipes crowded together with only initials for authorship. The "cream cake" here belongs to a family of American layer cakes named for their filling rather than their batter, and is often said to be close kin to the Boston cream pie that was appearing on Northern tables in the same decades. Heavy clove-and-allspice cakes of the sort Mrs. W. contributes were the older style, descended from English spice and molasses cakes, and the cane or sorghum syrup in the batter reflects the stock of a Southern pantry. The reliance on "yeast powder" alongside the older soda-and-cream-of-tartar pairing catches the moment when chemical leavening was reshaping American home baking but had not yet standardised it.