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White Mountain Cake
4 cups flour. 1 cup butter. 3 cups sugar, creamed with the butter. 1 cup sweet milk. 2 small teaspoonfuls cream of tartar. 1 small teaspoonful of soda. Whites of 10 eggs beaten very light.
Bake in jelly-cake pans; when cold, make an icing of whites of three eggs and one pound of sugar. Grate cocoanut over each layer of icing.--Mrs. P. McG. White Mountain Cake. 1 pound sugar. 1/2 pound butter. 3/4 pound of flour. 1 large teaspoonful essence of bitter almonds. Whites of 10 eggs, whipped very stiff. Cream butter and sugar, put next the eggs, then the flour, lastly the flavoring.--Mrs. D. C. K.
White Mountain Cake.
Make four or five thicknesses of cake, as for jelly cake Grate one large cocoanut. The juice and grated rind of two lemons or oranges. The whites of six eggs beaten very light, with one pound sugar. To this add the milk of one cocoanut, then rind and juice of one orange. Lastly, stir in the cocoanut well, and put between the cakes as you would jelly.--Mrs. J. L. White Mountain Cake. 1 pound flour. 1 pound sugar. 3/4 pound butter. Whites of 16 eggs. Wine-glass of wine or brandy. Bake in flat pans.
Grate two cocoanuts. Beat the whites of four or five eggs to a stiff froth, and mix as much sugar as for icing. Stir in the cocoanut; spread between each layer of the cake, as jelly cake. Ice it all, or only on top, or not at all, as you please.--Mrs. M.
Mountain Cake.
The whites of 8 eggs. 1 cup of butter. 2 cups of sugar. 3 cups of flour. 1/2 cup sweet milk. 1 teaspoonful of cream of tartar. 1/2 teaspoonful of soda. Mix all the ingredients well, and flavor with lemon. Bake in very shallow pans. Ice each cake separately and cover with jelly; then form a large cake, and ice over.-Mrs. Dr. S.
Five contributed versions of the same idea: a white butter cake baked thin, stacked, and filled with coconut. Two features make the page unusable as printed, and the rest is a lesson in how loosely nineteenth-century cake formulas were recorded.
- Essence of bitter almondsMrs. D. C. K. calls for a large teaspoonful. Nineteenth-century essence of bitter almonds was made from bitter almond kernels and, unless rectified, could carry hydrogen cyanide along with the benzaldehyde that gives the flavour; poisonings from almond flavouring were reported in the period. How dangerous a teaspoonful was would depend on the strength of the particular essence, but it is not a quantity to reproduce. Modern almond extract is a different product.
- Uncooked egg-white icing and fillingMrs. J. L.'s coconut filling and the icings in the other versions are raw whites beaten with sugar and citrus juice, spread between layers and left to stand. Nothing in them ever reaches a temperature that would kill Salmonella, and the layers hold moisture at room temperature for days. If you want a coconut layer cake, use a current recipe with a cooked or pasteurised-white icing.
- No oven heat, no timeNone of the five gives either. That was normal in 1879, when the cook judged a wood range by hand and by the colour of a scrap of paper thrown in. Thin butter cakes of this kind were baked hot and fast, but the book gives you nothing to work from.
- Weight versus cupMrs. D. C. K. and Mrs. M. work in pounds; Mrs. P. McG. and Mrs. Dr. S. work in cups. A pound of flour is roughly 3 1/2 to 4 cups and a pound of sugar about 2 1/4 cups, depending on how it is measured. The two systems sit side by side on the same page without comment.
- Cream of tartar and sodaThe two cup-measure versions use the pair as a homemade baking powder — soda for the gas, cream of tartar as the acid to release it. Commercial baking powder was available by 1879, but mixing your own was still common practice. Both cup-measure versions in fact use the same proportion, two parts cream of tartar to one of soda.
- "Jelly-cake pans" and "flat pans"Shallow round tins, of no stated size, meant for the thin layers of a stacked jelly cake. Mrs. J. L. calls for four or five thicknesses; the others assume thin stacked layers rather than two thick ones.
- "Wine-glass"By the usual nineteenth-century convention about 2 fluid ounces, or a quarter cup — a sherry glass, not a modern wine glass.
- Grating a coconutTwo of the versions want one or two whole nuts grated, and Mrs. J. L. wants the water from inside as liquid for the filling. Preparing a fresh nut this way is a substantial job, and part of why coconut cake read as festive and expensive.
Housekeeping in Old Virginia, edited by Marion Cabell Tyree and published in 1879, was assembled from contributions by "two hundred and fifty of Virginia's noted housewives," which is why five sets of initials appear beneath five different formulas — four headed White Mountain Cake and the last simply Mountain Cake. The name is usually traced to the snow-white look of the thing — white flour, white sugar, egg whites only, and drifts of grated coconut — rather than to any documented connection with New Hampshire; the White Mountains were a fashionable resort district in this period, though nothing here links the cake to them. Its real subject is abundance: eight to sixteen egg whites with no use given for the yolks, three-quarters of a pound of butter, and imported coconut, all in a Southern household less than fifteen years out of the war. Cakes like this were show pieces for a tea table, and the fact that five cooks all sent one in suggests it was the sort of recipe a Virginia hostess wanted to be known for.