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Washington Pie
One cupful sugar, one-half cupful butter, one-half cupful sweet milk, one-half cupful flour, one egg, one teaspoonful cream of tartar, one-half teaspoonful soda; flavor with lemon. Put on dinner plates--spread with apple sauce between each layer.--Mrs. Dr. J.
A plate cake of the sort every nineteenth-century household kept in rotation: thin layers baked on ordinary china, stacked with fruit while warm. One measurement in the original does not add up, so read the first point before you start.
- The flour is almost certainly wrongA half cup of flour against a cup of sugar, a half cup of butter, a half cup of milk and an egg gives a pourable batter that will not set into a layer. Comparable Washington pie recipes of the period call for a cup and a half to two cups; treat the printed figure as a typesetting loss and use enough flour for a soft cake batter that mounds on the spoon.
- Cream of tartar and sodaTogether these are the household ancestor of baking powder — roughly two parts acid to one part alkali. A teaspoon of cream of tartar with a half teaspoon of soda is close to two teaspoons of modern double-acting baking powder. Sift the soda through the flour and get the layers into the oven promptly, since this leavening starts working the moment the milk hits it.
- Sweet milkPlain whole milk, specified only to distinguish it from the sour or buttermilk that many recipes of the same book require. There is no substitution to make.
- "Put on dinner plates"The instruction is to bake the layers in shallow plate-sized rounds; tin pie plates were the usual baking vessel for this kind of cake. Modern equivalents are two or three 8- or 9-inch cake pans, buttered and floured, with the batter spread thin. Do not put a modern china plate in the oven.
- Oven and timeThe recipe gives no oven direction; 350F is a reasonable modern setting. Thin layers of this kind are done in 10 to 15 minutes; they should spring back and be barely coloured, since overbaking makes them dry and they have no fat-rich crumb to hide it.
- Flavour with lemonGrated zest of half a lemon creamed into the butter and sugar, or a half teaspoon of lemon extract.
- The apple sauceUse a thick, well-reduced unsweetened or lightly sweetened sauce; anything loose will soak the thin layers and slide out. Spread it while the layers are still slightly warm, then let the cake stand an hour so it settles and cuts cleanly.
- YieldTwo or three thin layers, serving six to eight. It is a same-day cake — no icing, no keeping qualities, best eaten within a day of baking.
Washington pie is the name for a plain cup-cake batter baked in thin rounds and stacked with jam, jelly, or fruit sauce, cut in wedges like a pie; the name refers to the format rather than to any documented connection with George Washington. It belongs to the era when chemical leavening had just made a quick cake possible for anyone with cream of tartar and soda on the shelf, which is why the recipe is so short: no beaten-egg engineering, no hours of creaming. That Housekeeping in Old Virginia (Marion Cabell Tyree, late 1870s) prints it as a contributed recipe from "Mrs. Dr. J." is characteristic of the book, which Tyree assembled from contributions credited on the title page to some 250 ladies of Virginia and her sister states, and reproduced largely as they wrote it, telegraphic measurements and all.