Date Cake
— Mrs. Hiram Gibbs
1/2 cup white sugar, 1/2 cup brown sugar, butter size walnut, yolk 1 egg, 1½ cup flour, 1 tsp. Royal baking powder, pinch salt, 1/2 package dates, 1/2 cup nuts, 1 cup boiling water. Stone dates and cut in thirds. Pour over them the boiling water. Cream sugar, butter and egg yolk. Add dates, water, chopped nuts, flour, baking powder and soda.
For the filling, put 1/2 cup nuts and 1/2 package dates through food chopper. Add 1/4 cup confectioner's sugar. Stir well, and add enough cream or milk to spread. Beat well.
For the frosting, beat the white of the egg stiff. Boil 1 cup granulated sugar and 1/4 cup water until it threads. Pour on the egg. Add 1/2 tsp. Slade's cream of tartar and 1 tsp. vanilla, and continue to beat until it is thick enough to spread.
— Mrs. H. P. Frost
A layer cake in the community-cookbook idiom: brand names, no pan size, no oven temperature, and a stray ingredient in the method that never made the list. Everything you need is recoverable, but a few decisions are yours.
- The missing sodaThe list calls for baking powder only, yet the method says "flour, baking powder and soda." With a modern double-acting powder the teaspoon is sufficient leavening; if you want the darker crumb the soda would give, 1/4 teaspoon is the most this quantity of batter will take without a soapy taste.
- Butter size of walnutAbout 1 ounce, or 2 tablespoons. This is a very lean cake by modern standards — the moisture comes from the dates and their soaking water, not from fat.
- Half a package of datesPackaged dates of the period came in cartons of more than one size, so this cannot be pinned exactly; read half a package as roughly 8 ounces, about 1 1/4 cups once pitted and cut. You need that amount twice, once for the batter and once for the filling, so buy a full pound.
- Order of workPour the boiling water over the cut dates and let them stand until barely warm before they go into the creamed mixture, or the egg yolk will scramble. The batter will look alarmingly loose; it is meant to.
- Pan and ovenNo pan or heat is given. Two greased 8-inch round layers at 350F for 25 to 30 minutes suits the quantity, since the recipe assumes a filling between layers. The same batter will bake as a 9x5 loaf in about 45 minutes, in which case use the filling as a topping.
- Royal and Slade'sBoth are period brands. Royal in this era was a cream-of-tartar baking powder rather than the double-acting product sold under the name now; Slade's was a packaged cream of tartar. Any current equivalent works; no substitution adjustment is needed.
- Boiled frosting, the hinge"Until it threads" is the soft-thread stage, 230 to 235F on a thermometer. Pour the syrup onto the stiff white in a thin steady stream while beating; dumped in at once it sets in lumps. Add the cream of tartar as directed, with the vanilla, once the syrup is in.
- Filling consistencyDates and nuts through a food chopper come out as a stiff paste. Add the milk or cream a teaspoon at a time — a tablespoon or two is usually enough, and an over-thinned filling will slide out from between the layers.
Philathea cook books were fundraisers for Philathea classes, the young women's Sunday-school organization that spread through Baptist and other Protestant churches in the United States and Canada in the first decades of the twentieth century, and they read like exactly what they were: contributions gathered from members, each signed, each assuming the reader already knows how her own oven behaves. This one carries two attributions, opening with Mrs. Hiram Gibbs and closing with Mrs. H. P. Frost; which name belongs to the cake cannot be settled from the page. The cake itself belongs to the moment when packaged dates became an ordinary grocery item in North America -- pressed into cardboard cartons and shipped from the Persian Gulf -- which is why the recipe measures them by package rather than by weight. Royal baking powder and Slade's cream of tartar are named in the way period contributors commonly named brands.