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Cream Jelly Cake
Whites of 2 eggs, 1 cupful of white sugar, 1 cupful of sweet milk, a piece of butter the size of an egg, 2 cupfuls of flour, 1/2 teaspoonful of soda and 1 teaspoonful of cream of tartar.
The cream for the jelly cake is made with the yolks of 2 eggs, ½ cupful of brown sugar, 1 cupful of sweet milk, 2 teaspoonfuls of cornstarch, flavor with lemon, cook in a saucepan and spread between the layers.
A thin-layered cake with a stovetop pastry cream between the layers, written for cooks who already knew how a jelly cake was assembled. The gaps are the oven, the pan size, and the fact that the filling must actually boil.
- The hinge: boil the creamCornstarch does not thicken until it reaches a simmer, and it needs a minute or so at that point to lose its raw taste. Cook the yolk, sugar, milk and cornstarch mixture over moderate heat, whisking, until it bubbles and coats the spoon thickly, then cool it completely before spreading. Warm filling will soak the layers and slide out.
- Butter the size of an eggAbout 2 ounces, or 4 tablespoons. Have it soft and cream it with the sugar.
- Soda and cream of tartarThis is homemade baking powder: 1/2 teaspoon soda with 1 teaspoon cream of tartar is roughly equivalent to 2 teaspoons of modern double-acting baking powder. Sift the cream of tartar with the flour and dissolve the soda in a little of the milk, then get the batter into the pans promptly, since single-acting leavening spends most of its lift in the bowl.
- Sweet milkOrdinary fresh whole milk, so called to distinguish it from the soured or buttermilk that many recipes of the period called for.
- Oven and pansNo temperature is given. Bake at 350F. Three 8-inch layers take about 15 to 18 minutes, two layers about 20 to 25; the layers of a jelly cake are meant to be thin.
- The whitesThe recipe does not say to beat them separately, and it works either way. Whipping them to soft peaks and folding them in last gives a noticeably lighter crumb from what is otherwise a fairly lean batter.
- Flavoring with lemonA teaspoon of lemon extract, or the grated zest of one lemon steeped in the hot milk. Add extract only after the cream is off the heat.
- Yield and servingOne cake of about 8 servings. Filling between the layers only, with the top left plain or dusted with sugar, suits the recipe as written, which mentions no frosting; the cake is best the day it is made, and any leftovers belong in the refrigerator because of the custard.
"Jelly cake" in nineteenth-century American cookbooks means a construction rather than a flavor: thin layers of plain cake baked in shallow tins and stacked with something spread between them. The filling was often jelly or jam, but cream, lemon, chocolate and boiled frostings all appear under the same heading, which is why this one is called a cream jelly cake. What marks it as a low-cost recipe is the bookkeeping of the eggs. Two eggs do double duty: the whites lighten and whiten the cake, the yolks thicken the filling, and nothing is left over in a bowl to spoil. The soda-and-cream-of-tartar pairing is the older leavening system, mixed in the cook's own bowl, and it persisted in thrifty household recipes well after commercial baking powders were on grocers' shelves, perhaps partly on price and partly on habit.