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Lady Baltimore Cake
1/2 cup shortening 1 cup sugar whites of 3 eggs 1/2 cup milk 1 teaspoon vanilla extract or 1/2 teaspoon almond extract 1 3/4 cups flour 2 teaspoons Royal Baking Powder Cream shortening; add sugar and unbeaten white of one egg; add the milk very slowly, beating between each addition; add flavoring; add the flour which has been sifted with the baking powder; lastly fold in the beaten whites of 2 eggs. Bake in square or round greased layer tins in hot oven about 15 minutes. Use the following filling and cover the top and sides of cake with white icing.
FILLING 1 1/2 cups sugar 3/4 cup water 2 eggs 1/2 cup chopped seeded raisins 1/2 cup chopped figs 1 cup chopped blanched almonds 1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract Boil sugar and water until syrup spins a thread. Pour hot syrup slowly over 2 whole eggs beaten together. Mix with fruit and nuts and flavoring. Spread between layers of cake.
A standard white layer cake with a cooked-syrup fruit-and-nut filling. The hinge is the syrup: take it to a true thread and pour it into the eggs in a thin stream while beating, or the filling will either stay soupy or scramble.
- "Hot oven"In this period a hot oven means roughly 400-425F. For thin layers baked 15 minutes, 400F is the safer reading; check at 12 minutes, since a white shortening layer can scorch on the bottom before the top colors.
- Spins a threadThread stage is around 230F on a candy thermometer (sources give roughly 223-235F). The syrup falls from a spoon in a fine strand that does not ball up in cold water. Below that the filling stays loose; taken much past 240F it will set up stiff and grainy.
- ShorteningWritten for vegetable shortening rather than butter. Butter can be substituted and many will prefer the flavour, though the crumb may be slightly less tender and the cake less bone-white.
- The flourHousehold flour of this period was often softer than modern all-purpose. For a fine white crumb, cake flour works well, or replace two tablespoons per cup of all-purpose with cornstarch.
- The egg methodThe recipe beats one unbeaten white into the creamed sugar and folds in the other two whipped. Whatever the reason, follow it as written: fold the beaten whites in two or three additions and stop while a few streaks remain.
- Raw egg in the fillingHot syrup poured over whole eggs cooks them only partially and the temperature reached is not reliable. If the cake is for children, the elderly, or anyone pregnant, use pasteurized shell eggs.
- Figs and raisinsThe recipe specifies only chopped figs; any good dried fig, stemmed and chopped, will do. "Seeded" raisins means raisins with the seeds removed, so ordinary seedless raisins are a direct substitute; both can be softened in a little warm water and drained before chopping.
- Yield and finishingThe recipe does not state tin size or number of layers; a batter of this size will fill two 8-inch pans. The "white icing" is left unspecified; a boiled or seven-minute icing, made from sugar syrup poured over beaten whites, is the likely intention and sits more lightly against the fruit filling than a buttercream.
Lady Baltimore cake is bound up with Owen Wister's 1906 novel Lady Baltimore, set in a lightly disguised Charleston, in which the narrator eats a cake of that name in a women's tea room and is undone by it. The book was a bestseller and the cake followed it into national circulation; Charleston tradition credits Alicia Rhett Mayberry with baking the version Wister tasted, though this is a local attribution rather than a documented one. What is consistent across early printed versions is the shape of the thing: white layers raised on beaten egg whites, and a filling of raisins, figs and almonds bound with boiled sugar syrup, a Southern dried-fruit tradition dressed up in the pale, refined style that a fashionable cake was expected to have. Its appearance here, in a booklet issued by a baking powder company, shows how quickly a regional specialty could be absorbed into the chemically leavened, brand-sponsored baking of the early twentieth century, with the manufacturer's product named in the ingredient list.