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Butterscotch Cake
2 C brown sugar 4 T flour 3 eggs 2 C cold water 2 t vanilla 1½ lb. vanilla wafers Take largest cake plate and put layer of cookies, then custard, then cookies, then custard, and so on until all are used. Put in ice-box and serve with whipped cream. This makes a very large cake.
An icebox cake in the plainest possible terms: a cooked brown-sugar custard layered with store-bought vanilla wafers and left to soften overnight. The book assumes you know how to make a boiled custard, because it never actually tells you to cook it.
- The custard must be cookedThe instructions jump straight to assembly, but sugar, flour, eggs and water are a stovetop custard base. Whisk the flour and brown sugar together, stir in the water, cook over medium heat until it thickens, then temper in the beaten eggs and cook a minute or two more to about 175F. Raw eggs and raw flour left to sit in the refrigerator are neither safe nor palatable.
- Water, not milkTwo cups of cold water rather than milk makes this a butterscotch sauce thickened with egg rather than a dairy custard. It sets softer and tastes sharper of molasses. Some cooks substitute milk; the result is richer but less pointedly butterscotch.
- C, T and tThe abbreviations are cups, tablespoons and teaspoons. Four tablespoons of flour is a quarter cup, which is a light thickening for two cups of liquid — the eggs do most of the setting work.
- No butter, despite the nameButterscotch here means brown sugar, not butter. A tablespoon or two of butter stirred into the finished custard off the heat improves the texture, though the recipe does not call for it.
- A pound and a half of wafersThat is roughly two of today's 11-ounce boxes, or about 175 wafers. The recipe is right that it makes a very large cake; on a standard platter it will build up into a deep slab of many layers.
- Chilling time"Put in ice-box" gives no time; overnight is the reasonable assumption. The wafers need several hours to absorb moisture from the custard and turn cakelike, and a short chill will leave them crunchy.
- YieldMade at full scale this serves a crowd, as the recipe's own note implies. Halved, it suits a smaller plate and a family-sized number of servings.
Wafer icebox cakes belong to the era of domestic refrigeration, when the ice-box became a household fixture and cookbooks began printing desserts that required cold rather than heat. The method depends on a factory product -- the boxed vanilla wafer -- used in place of sponge layers a cook would otherwise have had to bake. Community compilations circulated such recipes quickly, because they were cheap, could be assembled the night before a supper, and needed no oven on the day. The butterscotch flavouring is simply brown sugar cooked with egg; the word is generally traced to nineteenth-century English confectionery, where "scotch" is often said to refer to scoring the cooled candy into squares rather than to Scotland.