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Ice-Box Cake
1 lemon (juice and rind) 3 eggs 1 T vanilla Mrs. Bert Steir. 1 pt. whipping cream Use ice-box cake tin, line with lady fingers, bottom side up. Mix sugar and butter thoroughly (about 25 minutes) with the hands, then add eggs, of which the whites and yolks have been beaten separately and juice and rind of the lemon. Pour batter on lady fingers, cover with lady fingers. Then whip the cream, add vanilla and sweeten cream. Put on top of second layer of lady fingers. Add cherries and pecans on top of cream. Put in ice-box for at least 12 hours. Makes fine birthday cake.
Mrs. A. C. Brockman.
This is a classic uncooked refrigerator cake, and that is precisely the problem: the eggs are beaten raw into a butter-and-sugar base that is never heated at any stage. It then sits at refrigerator temperature for twelve hours or more before being eaten.
- Raw egg, never cookedBoth yolks and whites go into the filling uncooked and stay that way. Salmonella in shell eggs is the specific risk, and chilling does not kill it — twelve hours in the ice-box only holds the count steady at best. A current recipe using pasteurized eggs or a cooked custard base should be used instead.
- The ingredient list is incompleteThe method calls for sugar and butter creamed together for about twenty-five minutes, but neither appears in the ingredient list as printed; the cherries and pecans of the topping are missing from it too. Omissions of this kind are common in community cookbooks set from handwritten cards, and the intended quantities cannot be recovered from the page.
- Two cooks, one recipeTwo names, one recipe -- The attribution to Mrs. Bert Steir sits in the middle of the ingredient column while Mrs. A. C. Brockman signs the end. This may be two submissions run together in setting, which could also account for the missing ingredients.
- What an ice-box cake tin wasA deep, straight-sided tin, rectangular or round and sometimes with a removable bottom, used for chilled unbaked desserts. A loaf pan lined with parchment does the same job.
- Twenty-five minutes of creamingCreaming butter and sugar by hand — here literally with the hands — until the sugar dissolved could take that long before electric mixers were common in home kitchens. The instruction is a measure of the period, not of the dish.
- Lady fingers, bottom side upSavoiardi laid with the flat bottom facing up, as the recipe directs, so the flat surface meets the filling. They were frequently a bought item, which is part of the appeal of an unbaked cake.
Ice-box cakes appeared in American community cookbooks in quantity through the 1920s and 1930s, tracking the spread of the mechanical household refrigerator. The form is usually the same — a bought sponge or cracker layered with a rich uncooked filling, left overnight to soften into something sliceable — and it is often traced to the chocolate-wafer packaging campaigns that promoted the technique. In a community cookbook, the appeal is obvious: no oven, no baking skill, and a dessert that must be made the day before, which is exactly what a cook wants when she is feeding a crowd on Sunday.