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Orange Cake (One and one-half cups sugar)
One and one-half cups sugar, 3 eggs, 2 cups flour, 1/2 cup cold water, 1/2 tsp. soda, juice and rind of one lemon. Bake in four layer cake pans. When baked, put on a large plate and soak one at a time with this mixture: juice and rind of two oranges, whites of two eggs, 1/2 cup sugar.
— Mrs. John Legg
A fatless sponge batter baked in four thin layers and then steeped in a sweet orange mixture. The soaking mixture is the problem: it is raw egg white, beaten with juice and sugar and poured over the cake with no cooking at any stage.
- The uncooked egg whitesThe whites of two eggs go onto the baked layers and are never heated. Raw egg white carries a Salmonella risk that acid and sugar do not eliminate, and the moist, sugary cake then sits at room temperature while it absorbs the liquid — conditions that favour bacterial growth rather than checking it. Use a current recipe for a cooked or boiled orange icing instead.
- Why it is not a meringueThe whites are not whipped over heat, not baked, and not brought anywhere near the 160F at which egg proteins are considered safe. Nothing in the method resembles the boiled frostings of the same era, where hot syrup is poured into the whites.
- No oven guidance at allThe original names neither temperature nor time, which was normal in a church-society collection where the cook was assumed to know her own range. Anyone working from a period cake like this is filling in the most important variable by guesswork.
- The leaveningHalf a teaspoon of soda has only the lemon juice to react with, and much of that acid ends up as flavour rather than lift. Cakes of this type relied heavily on air beaten into the eggs; the soda is a supporting player, not the engine.
- No butter or oilSugar, eggs, flour and water only. This is a fatless sponge, and fatless cakes stale quickly; the soaking may have been as much about moisture as about orange flavour.
- Four layer pansThe recipe gives no tin size or shape. Divided four ways, this batter gives very thin layers, closer to the tiers of a torte than to a two-layer birthday cake.
- Zest, then and now"Rind" here means the grated outer peel, not the white pith.
Orange cake in American community cookbooks of this period is often a plain light cake carrying a raw or barely cooked citrus icing, and similar versions circulate under the names of individual contributors — here Mrs. John Legg. The Philathea Cook Book belongs to a large family of fundraising collections produced by Bible-class and church societies, in which each member submitted a household formula in her own shorthand; the assumption throughout is a reader who already knows how her stove behaves and how a cake batter should look. Soaking baked layers one at a time in a sweetened juice and egg mixture extends a fatless sponge into something moist enough to serve for company.