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Whortleberry Cake
6 eggs, beaten separately. 1 pound sugar. 3/4 pound butter. 1 quart flour. 1/2 pint sifted meal. 1 teaspoonful soda A little mace and cinnamon. After mixing, stir in one quart of the berries, so as not to mash them, having previously dusted them with flour. Mix the soda with one-half pint of cream or milk.--Mrs. A.P.
A large, old-style butter cake, closer to a pound cake than to a modern blueberry muffin batter. The measurements are by weight and by liquid measure, which needs translating before anything else.
- The volumesA quart of flour is about 4 cups (roughly 1 lb of soft wheat flour as it was then sold). Half a pint of sifted meal is 1 cup of fine cornmeal, and half a pint of cream or milk is 1 cup. A quart of berries is about 1 1/4 lb.
- WhortleberriesThe name covers the wild huckleberries and lowbush blueberries gathered across Virginia in summer. Cultivated blueberries are the direct substitute; they are larger and juicier, so drain them well after washing.
- Flouring the fruitThe dusting with flour is the hinge of the recipe. Toss the berries in a spoonful or two of the measured flour and fold them in at the very end with a light hand, or they sink and bleed through the crumb.
- Soda and acidA teaspoon of soda needs something sour to work against. Unpasteurised cream or milk in a nineteenth-century kitchen may well have been slightly soured, which would have supplied that acid, though the recipe does not say so. With today's sweet cream or milk the soda has little to react with; use buttermilk or clabbered milk, or substitute 2 teaspoons of baking powder for the soda.
- Eggs beaten separatelyThe recipe gives no mixing order beyond "beaten separately," but the whites whipped to soft peaks and folded in last add lift alongside the soda. Beat the yolks into the creamed butter and sugar, add the dry ingredients alternately with the milk, then fold the whites through before the fruit.
- The cornmealThe cup of meal gives the cake a slightly sandy, sturdy crumb that holds the berries up. Use a fine-ground yellow or white meal, not coarse polenta grind.
- BakingNo oven direction is given. A moderate modern oven, about 350F, suits a butter cake of this size; in a large tube pan or two loaf pans allow 60 to 75 minutes and test with a skewer at the center, avoiding a berry.
- YieldWith a pound of sugar and 3/4 lb of butter this is a big cake, enough for roughly 16 to 20 servings. Wrapped well it keeps for several days.
"Whortleberry" is the older English name, carried to America and applied loosely to the wild huckleberries and blueberries that grew on cutover hillsides and in pine barrens through the eastern states. Berries of this kind were gathered rather than grown in the nineteenth century, which is why a recipe like this one calls for a full quart at a time and appears in a summer-and-what-you-have idiom rather than as a year-round standby. Housekeeping in Old Virginia (copyright 1878, in print from 1879) was edited by Marion Cabell Tyree, who drew on contributions from ladies in Virginia and neighbouring states; contributors are commonly identified only by initials, and the "Mrs. A.P." signature is typical of the book's method: a community cookbook before that term existed, printing each woman's household formula more or less as she wrote it down. The cornmeal alongside the wheat flour is a Southern touch, and the reliance on soda with cream rather than on commercial baking powder places the recipe in the decades when both were in use.