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George Washington Cherry Cake
3/4 cups butter. 1 3/4 cups sugar. 1 teaspoon vanilla. 6 eggs, whites. 3 cups flour. 1 cup milk. 3 level teaspoons baking powder.
Add one cup cherries cut in two or three pieces. Bake in loaf pan.
The instructions here are barely instructions at all — a list of quantities and two brief directions — which was normal in a 1920 book aimed at cooks who already knew how a butter cake went together. The method is standard creamed cake: cream butter and sugar, add vanilla, alternate flour and milk, fold in stiffly beaten whites last, then the cherries.
- Oven and timeNo temperature is given, as was usual in books of this date, and many home ranges had no reliable gauge. Around 350F suits this batter. In loaf form a batter this size needs roughly 55 to 70 minutes; test with a skewer in the centre rather than by the clock.
- Pan sizeThree cups of flour, six whites and a cup of milk makes a large batter, probably more than one standard 9x5 loaf pan will take without doming or spilling. Divide between two loaf pans, or use a 10-inch tube pan.
- The cherries are the hingeCut fruit dropped into a loose batter sinks to the bottom. Toss the pieces in a spoonful of the measured flour before folding them in, and drain them well if they are canned or bottled, or the extra liquid will streak the crumb.
- Egg whitesSix large whites are roughly 3/4 cup. Beat them to soft, not dry, peaks and fold them in at the end; whites beaten stiff and dry break up and leave the cake coarse. The six yolks keep several days for custard or mayonnaise.
- "3/4 cups butter"Read as 3/4 cup, 6 oz or 170 g. The recipe calls for no salt at all; if your butter is salted, add none.
- FlourHousehold flour of this period is generally said to have been softer than today's all-purpose. For a finer crumb, replace 2 tablespoons of each cup with cornstarch, or use cake flour.
- Baking powderThree level teaspoons to three cups of flour, one per cup, is a common ratio for the period and still works; a slightly smaller amount will give a finer crumb if you prefer.
- Cherries to useSour or Morello cherries, fresh or jarred, give the tartness the sweet white batter wants. Maraschino cherries — common in American cakes of this era — will tint the crumb pink and push the sugar higher.
- YieldTwo loaves, about 20 slices, or one large tube cake. It keeps three or four days wrapped.
The name is the giveaway: this is a Washington's Birthday cake, made for February 22 in the era when that holiday was widely kept in American schools and households, and tied to the cherry-tree anecdote popularised by Washington's early biographer Mason Locke Weems rather than to anything the man did. A white cake studded with cherries appeared under names like Cherry Cake, Washington Cake and Martha Washington Cake in collections of the period. Mary A. Wilson wrote food columns for the Philadelphia Inquirer and compiled her book in the years around 1920, when wartime sugar and butter economies were only just lifting — six egg whites and nearly two cups of sugar signal a celebration cake, not everyday baking.