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Banana Cream Cake
3½ cups pastry flour. 1¼ cups sifted granulated sugar 31/2 level teaspoons Calumet Baking Powder Yolks of 3 eggs 1/2 cup butter 3/4 cup milk White of 1 egg, beat with 1/2 egg-shell of water added Sift flour once, then measure; add baking powder, and sift three times. Cream butter and sugar thoroughly; add eggs, well beaten, then flour and milk alternately; bake in two layers about 30 to 35 minutes.
Filling White of 1 egg, beaten well, and add 2 cups powdered sugar and 1 sour apple, grated. Slice two bananas lengthwise and cover with filling. Put this between and on top of each layer.
This is a page from a baking powder company's promotional booklet, and it has two problems: the printed ingredient list is incomplete, and the filling is an uncooked raw-egg icing that is spread on the cake and eaten as is.
- Raw egg white, never heatedThe filling is a beaten raw white stirred with powdered sugar and grated apple, then layered onto a cooled cake. Nothing in it ever reaches a temperature that would kill Salmonella, and the moist, sugary, room-temperature layer sits on the cake until it is served. Uncooked-white frostings of this kind were routine in 1900 and are not made from shell eggs today; a current recipe using a cooked meringue or pasteurized whites should be used instead.
- The flour is missingThe ingredient list runs sugar, baking powder, yolks, butter, milk and white, then instructs "sift flour once, then measure" — but no quantity was ever printed. The proportions suggest a standard two-layer cake, and the flour amount cannot be recovered from what is on the page. This alone makes the recipe unfollowable as printed.
- Calumet baking powderCalumet was a double-acting phosphate-and-alum powder from Chicago, and this booklet existed to sell it. Modern double-acting powders are close relatives, but 3½ level teaspoons is a heavy hand by current standards, where about 1 teaspoon per cup of flour is usual — another reason the missing flour figure matters.
- "Half an egg-shell of water"A common old measure for a small splash: roughly a tablespoon. It was added to a beaten white to loosen it, though the page does not make clear whether this white was meant for the batter or the filling.
- "A sour apple"A tart cooking apple; period markets offered varieties such as Rhode Island Greening or Baldwin, though the recipe names none. Grated raw into the sugar and white, it added moisture and acidity. Granny Smith is a common supermarket substitute.
- No oven temperatureThe original gives only "about 30 to 35 minutes," which was normal in books written for coal and wood ranges where the cook judged heat by hand. Any modern reading of that timing has to be supplied from outside the text.
Calumet's booklet was one of the small paperbound giveaways that baking powder companies produced in the first decades of the twentieth century, with its brand named in nearly every formula so that the reader could not substitute. Banana desserts appear in American cookbooks in growing numbers from the 1890s onward, as refrigerated steamships and the United Fruit trade turned bananas from an expensive curiosity into a cheap, year-round grocery item; layer cakes, custards and "banana creams" followed quickly.