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Nut and Raisin Filling
2 tablespoons lemon juice ½ teaspoon salt cup powdered sugar Seed raisins and chop until fine; add chopped nuts.
Beat egg until stiff; add sugar, nuts, raisins and lemon juice.
A layer-cake filling of the uncooked meringue type, and the printed text has come down to us incomplete as well as unsafe. Two separate problems are worth spelling out.
- Why not as writtenThe egg is beaten stiff and never heated at any stage; the printed method says only "beat egg" and nothing in it cooks the mixture. Uncooked shell egg carries a real risk of Salmonella, and sugar and lemon juice do nothing to reduce it. Use a current recipe for an uncooked or cooked meringue filling instead.
- The ingredient list is brokenAs printed, the quantities are incomplete: the sugar reads "cup powdered sugar" with no figure, the nuts and raisins are given no measure at all, and the egg appears only in the method. There is no way to recover the original proportions honestly.
- "Powdered sugar" in this periodIn American books of the 1900s powdered sugar usually meant a finely ground granulated sugar, coarser than today's confectioners' sugar and without cornstarch. It is not interchangeable one-for-one by volume with the modern boxed product.
- "Seed raisins"The instruction is to remove the seeds by hand; seeded muscats and similar raisins were still in ordinary use, alongside the seedless sorts that later displaced them. Modern raisins need no seeding, only chopping.
- Half a teaspoon of saltThat is a great deal of salt for a small sweet filling. Given how incomplete the printed ingredient list is, there is no way to settle whether the figure reflects period taste or a printing error.
- What it was forA filling of this kind was spread between the layers of a plain layer cake. The book gives no yield, and because the quantities are missing the intended amount cannot be recovered.
Uncooked egg-white fillings and frostings were common in American cake baking from the late nineteenth century onward, helped along by cheap fine-ground sugar and the rotary egg beater. Nut and raisin fillings of this sort let a cook dress up a plain layer cake without a stove-top syrup or a double boiler. Lowney's book, published by the Walter M. Lowney Company of Boston to promote its cocoa and chocolate, is typical of the turn-of-the-century manufacturer cookbook: a full domestic dessert repertoire assembled around the sale of one product, with the non-chocolate recipes included to make the volume worth keeping in the kitchen.