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Cream Filling for Sponge Cake
1 pint sweet milk, put on to boil. 2 eggs. 1/2 cup of sugar. 1 heaping tablespoon of flour.
Beat these last three well together. Just as the milk comes to a boil stir in one tablespoonful of butter and then the above mixture. Stir constantly until the cream thickens like mush. When cold, flavor to taste. Split the layers and fill. "FLORA BRIDE'S CAKE." 15 whites. 2 cups sugar. 1/2 lb. butter (1 cup). 1 cup sweet milk. 2 rounding teaspoons baking powder sifted 5 times with 1 lb. of Flora flour. Almond and vanilla.
WHITE CAKE--"MRS. MARSHALL." 14 whites. 1 lb. sugar. 1/2 lb. flour. 1 cup sweet milk. 1/2 lb. butter. 1/2 teaspoon soda. 1 teaspoon cream tartar. Vanilla and orange. Cream soda with butter; sift cream tartar with flour.
The first paragraph is a complete pastry cream; the three cake formulas that follow it are ingredient lists only, printed as memoranda rather than instructions. Treat the filling as the recipe and the cakes as reference.
- MeasuresA pint of milk is 2 cups. The "heaping tablespoon" of flour is roughly 1 1/2 level tablespoons — enough to thicken 2 cups of milk to a soft custard, not a firm pastry cream. If you want a filling stiff enough to hold between layers without weeping, use 3 tablespoons flour or 2 tablespoons cornstarch.
- The hinge: temper the eggsAdding the sugar-egg-flour mixture straight into boiling milk risks scrambling it. Whisk a ladle of the hot milk into the egg mixture first, then return everything to the pan. The recipe's own safeguard is the sugar and flour beaten into the eggs, which raises their coagulation point, but tempering is more reliable.
- Cook the flour out"Thickens like mush" is the right visual cue, but stop there and it tastes pasty. Once it thickens, keep it at a bare simmer for a further two minutes, stirring, to cook the raw starch. It will loosen slightly and then set again as it cools.
- Cooling and flavoringFlavoring after cooling, as directed, preserves vanilla and almond extract that would otherwise boil off. Press plastic wrap or buttered paper onto the surface while it cools to prevent a skin, and refrigerate rather than leaving it on the counter.
- YieldAbout 2 1/4 cups, enough to fill two layers generously or three thinly in an 8- or 9-inch cake.
- "Flora flour"Apparently a proprietary name of the period rather than a type of flour; nothing on the page identifies the mill or the grade. For the cake formulas use modern cake flour, or all-purpose with 2 tablespoons per cup replaced by cornstarch. Repeated sifting aerates the flour and distributes the leavening evenly; with modern baking powder two siftings is plenty.
- Soda and cream of tartarIn the Mrs. Marshall list, 1/2 teaspoon soda with 1 teaspoon cream of tartar is a homemade baking powder in the classic 1:2 ratio; about 2 teaspoons of commercial baking powder gives comparable lift. The instruction to cream the soda with the butter and sift the cream of tartar with the flour keeps the alkali and the acid apart until the batter is mixed.
- Egg whitesMeasure by volume rather than counting: fourteen to fifteen whites is roughly 1 3/4 to 2 cups.
The book, like many American community and household cookbooks of the era, appears to have been assembled from contributed receipts, and this page shows the seams: a filling, then cakes credited to a flour brand and to a woman by name, all printed without method because any reader was assumed to know how to cream butter and sugar and fold in whites. The filling itself is the standard boiled custard or crème pâtissière thickened with flour rather than cornstarch, which is often said to have been the ordinary American practice before boxed cornstarch became a pantry staple. The heavy white cakes beside it belong to the age of the cake that used a dozen or more whites at once — such recipes are traditionally said to have traveled in pairs with a gold cake that used up the yolks.