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White Mountain Ash Cake
1 pound white sugar. 1 teacup of butter. 1/2 1/2 teacup sweet milk. Whites of 10 eggs. 1/2 small teaspoonful of soda. 1 teaspoonful cream tartar. 3 cups of flour. Flavor with vanilla or almond.
Bake in jelly-cake pans, with icing and cocoanut between. Icing for cake.-One pound fine white sugar, and whites of three eggs.--Miss E. P.
The cake itself is a straightforward late-nineteenth-century white layer cake, but the icing is nothing but raw egg white beaten with sugar and spread on a cooled cake, which is the reason for the caution above.
- The uncooked icingA pound of sugar beaten into three raw whites is spread between and over cooled layers and never sees heat. Whole raw whites carry a real Salmonella risk, and sugar at this concentration does not reliably kill bacteria; the coconut filling only adds surface area for it to sit on. Use a current icing recipe for the finish.
- TeacupA teacup in nineteenth-century American recipes is usually reckoned at about three-quarters of a modern cup, roughly 6 fluid ounces, though the book does not define its measures. A teacup of butter on that reading is about 6 oz, or a stick and a half.
- A pound of white sugarAbout 2¼ cups granulated. Loaf sugar broken and rolled at home ran finer than today's granulated, and caster sugar is the closer match for creaming, though granulated sugar was also commonly sold by this date.
- Ten whitesTen modern large whites come to roughly 1¼ cups; period eggs may have run smaller, so measuring by volume is safer than counting. The recipe says nothing about what became of the yolks.
- Soda and cream of tartarHalf a small teaspoon of soda with a full teaspoon of cream of tartar is the homemade equivalent of about two teaspoons of baking powder. The recipe does not say how they were incorporated.
- Jelly-cake pansShallow round layer pans, 8 or 9 inches across, filled thinly. A batter this size will give three or four thin layers rather than two deep ones.
- CocoanutFresh coconut, grated at home from the nut, or dried shredded coconut, which was becoming commercially available in this period. Modern sweetened flake is much wetter and sweeter; unsweetened desiccated is nearer what was meant.
- No oven temperature givenNone is stated; the recipe leaves the judgement to the cook. Thin layer pans of a butter cake of this richness will want around 350F and are done in well under half an hour.
Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1878), compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree, was assembled from contributions by named and initialled Virginia housekeepers — hence the "Miss E. P." at the end, a form of attribution used throughout the book. White Mountain cake was a common name in American cookbooks of the 1870s and 1880s for a white layer cake finished with a snowy boiled or uncooked icing; the name is usually taken as a reference to the New Hampshire peaks, though that reading is traditional rather than documented. Coconut versions became fashionable as prepared desiccated coconut was more widely sold in the later nineteenth century. The "Ash" in this title is unexplained: an ash cake elsewhere in Southern cookery is a cornmeal cake baked in the hearth ashes, which this is not; whether it is a compositor's slip or a household name attached to the white mountain ash tree is not known. The recipe is certainly extravagant: ten whites, a pound of sugar, and a second pound for the icing.