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IMPROVED LADY McMILLIN CAKE
1 cup butter. 2 cups sugar. Whites and yolks 6 eggs or 12 yolks beaten very light. 1 cup sweet milk. 3 3/4 cups flour. 2 rounded or 4 level teaspoons baking powder. 2 teaspoons cinnamon. 1 tablespoon (heaping) cocoa. 1/2 teaspoon nutmeg. 1 cup blackberry jam. 1/2 cup cordial or whisky. Cream butter, add half sugar to butter; beat very light. Beat yolks light with rest of sugar. Sift flour several times with baking powder, and add alternately with milk and whites. Mix spices and cocoa with cordial; add to batter; gently stir in jam last.
A Southern-style blackberry jam cake, given in the shorthand of a period recipe: no pan, no oven temperature, no time. Everything below is what the original assumes you already know.
- The hinge: fold, don't stirThe hinge: mix as little as possible at the end -- the whites go in alternately with the milk, and the recipe is explicit that the jam is "gently" stirred in last. Working the batter hard after the jam goes in risks deflating the whites and a heavier crumb.
- Oven and timeNone is given. For a heavy butter cake of this kind a moderate oven, around 350F, is a reasonable modern starting point: layers roughly 30-35 minutes, a single tube or bundt pan closer to an hour. Test with a skewer at the thickest point. Pan and timing are a reconstruction, not the book's instruction.
- Pans and yieldThe batter is large: two cups of sugar (a little under a pound), six eggs, nearly four cups of flour. It would fill three 9-inch layers or a 10-inch tube pan and serve a crowd; the exact yield is a guess.
- Sweet milkSimply fresh whole milk, as opposed to the buttermilk or clabbered milk also kept in the kitchen. No substitution needed.
- The egg choice"Whites and yolks 6 eggs or 12 yolks" is a real alternative, not a typo. Twelve yolks alone give a richer, closer, more golden cake, but without the beaten whites it will not rise as high. It would obviously suit a kitchen with spare yolks on hand, though the recipe does not say why the option is offered.
- Rounded versus level teaspoonsTwo rounded teaspoons of baking powder equal roughly four level ones, which is what the recipe says: about one level teaspoon per cup of flour, in line with ordinary modern practice.
- Cordial or whiskyBlackberry cordial would echo the jam, though the recipe specifies only "cordial or whisky." Bourbon is common in Kentucky jam cakes. The half cup is a real liquid measure and part of the batter's moisture, not a flavoring splash to be cut.
- CocoaOne heaping tablespoon in this much batter is a background note, not a chocolate cake. Natural unsweetened cocoa is what a kitchen of this period would most likely have had; Dutch-process is a matter of preference.
- FinishingNo icing is specified. Caramel or brown-sugar boiled icing is the usual companion to a jam cake; the cake also keeps well plain, wrapped, and improves on the second day.
Blackberry jam cake belongs to the Upland South, where a jar of last summer's jam, a handful of spices and a little cordial turned a plain butter cake into something fit for Christmas or a wedding. Its ancestors are often said to be the spiced fruit cakes of English baking, thinned out and adapted to what a farm pantry actually held, though the line of descent is a matter of tradition rather than record. Recipes of this kind circulated under the name of the woman who contributed them, and the "improved" in the title marks somebody's revision of a version already in circulation; who Lady McMillin was is not recorded in the book.