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Lady Baltimore Cake
Make six-egg white cake. Flavor with rosewater and ice with white icing. Put the following in filling: 1 cup raisins cut in pieces. 1 cup pecans or walnuts, cut. 1/2 cup figs, if liked.
Mix with icing and put between cake. Ice plain and put fruit on top of cake. The same kind, only use raisins whole, nuts in half and figs in strips.
This is an assembly note rather than a full recipe: Mrs. Wilson assumes you already have a six-egg-white cake and a batch of white icing in hand. The gaps are worth filling before you start.
- The cake itselfA "six-egg white cake" of this period is a butter cake using six egg whites in place of whole eggs. Proportions varied, but something on the order of 1 cup butter, 2 cups sugar, 3 to 3 1/2 cups flour and 1 cup milk is typical. Mrs. Wilson gives no pan size or baking instruction; two or three 9-inch layers at 350F for 25 to 30 minutes is a modern working suggestion, not hers.
- What "white icing" means hereNot a confectioners'-sugar glaze. The traditional partner is boiled icing: a sugar syrup cooked to about 240F beaten into stiff egg whites, which is what gives the filling enough body to hold a cup of nuts and a cup of fruit. A seven-minute icing over simmering water does the same job.
- The hingeFold the fruit and nuts in while the icing is still warm and flowing. Once boiled icing sets it turns marshmallowy and will tear the crumb of a delicate white cake as you spread it.
- Divide the icing firstMake one batch, set aside about a third for the plain outer coat, then stir the fruit into the remainder. Mixing everything together leaves you nothing clean for the top and sides.
- RosewaterModern rosewater varies enormously in strength. Start with 1/2 teaspoon in the batter and taste the batter before adding more; the cheap grocery kind can turn soapy fast.
- The raisinsMany later versions soak the raisins in sherry or brandy for several hours first, which Mrs. Wilson does not mention. Soaked and well-drained raisins will also draw less moisture out of the icing.
- FigsUse dried figs, stems trimmed. If they are hard, steep them briefly in hot water and pat dry — otherwise they stay leathery against the soft cake.
- The last two sentencesThey describe the decoration, not a second filling: the same raisins, nuts and figs left whole, halved and cut in strips are arranged on the plain iced top.
- YieldThe recipe specifies no pan size or yield; a cake of this sort will serve roughly 12 to 16. Boiled icing is best eaten within a day or two, after which it tends to weep.
Lady Baltimore cake has nothing to do with the city's colonial proprietors and everything to do with a novel: Owen Wister's Lady Baltimore (1906), set in Charleston, whose narrator eats a fig-and-nut-filled white cake at a tea room. The cake is traditionally credited to Alicia Rhett Mayberry of Charleston, who is said to have sent Wister one here.. Whatever its origin, the novel made it a national fixture, and by the time Mary A. Wilson compiled her cookbook for a Philadelphia readership she could assume her audience knew what it was and needed only the filling. Her terse, telegraphic style is characteristic: Wilson wrote for newspapers during and after the First World War, when households were urged to conserve sugar.