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Calumet Cream Cake
3 cups pastry flour 3 level teaspoons Calumet Baking Powder 1/2 cup butter 1¼ cups granulated sugar Yolks of 3 eggs 3/4 cup cold water Whites of 3 eggs 1 teaspoon orange extract Sift flour once, then measure; add baking powder and sift three times; cream butter and sugar, add well beaten yolks, then flour and water alternately, then extract, beat long and hard and fold in lightly the well beaten whites. Bake in moderately slow oven for 30 to 35 minutes. (See illustration, page 62.) 1 egg white 2 cups confectioner's sugar Filling 1½ tablespoons cream 1/4 teaspoon lemon extract Put egg, milk and extract into bowl. Gradually add sugar, beating long, and hard.
A plain butter layer cake with a boiled-sugar-free "cream" filling, printed as advertising for a baking powder company. The ingredient list has been scrambled in transcription, so read the whole thing before starting.
- The garbled ingredient listThe filling is headed with cream but the method says "egg, milk and extract," and the trailing "1/2 cup butter 1 cup boiling water" belongs to no step given here. Treat the filling as one egg white, 1 1/2 tablespoons cream, 1/4 teaspoon lemon extract and 2 cups confectioner's sugar, and ignore the orphaned butter and water.
- Raw egg white in the fillingThe filling is never heated, so the egg white goes in uncooked. Use pasteurized liquid egg whites if you are serving anyone pregnant, elderly, very young or immunocompromised; the alternative is a cooked frosting from a current recipe.
- Moderately slow ovenThe book gives no temperatures; "moderately slow" is conventionally read as somewhere around 325F. A hotter oven risks browning the edges before a butter cake this rich sets in the middle. Thirty to thirty-five minutes suits layers, not a single deep pan.
- Pans and yieldNo pan size is given. Two 9-inch round layers, greased and floured, would suit this quantity, and the cake should serve about eight to ten. A single deep pan will need appreciably longer and a tester check.
- Pastry flourSoft, low-protein flour. Modern cake flour is the closest match measure for measure; all-purpose gives a tougher crumb. The instruction to sift once, then measure, then sift three more times is not fussiness -- sifting before measuring was the standard convention of the period for getting a consistent cup of flour, and it changes the volume of a cup by a noticeable amount.
- Calumet Baking PowderA double-acting phosphate-and-alum powder, still sold under the name. Any modern double-acting powder works at the same three level teaspoons.
- "Beat long and hard," then foldThe hinge of the recipe. Beat vigorously only until the flour and water are in and the batter is smooth, then fold the whipped whites in with a spatula in as few strokes as will incorporate them. Beating after the whites go in collapses the only leavening you cannot replace.
- Filling consistencyOne and a half tablespoons of cream against two cups of confectioner's sugar makes a stiff paste; the egg white does most of the loosening. Add cream a teaspoon at a time if it will not spread.
Reliable Recipes was a promotional cookbook published by the Calumet Baking Powder Company of Chicago, founded in the late 1880s and later absorbed into General Foods; the name is commonly traced to the Calumet region south of the city, though the origin is not settled. Books like it were given away or sold for a few cents, and recipes that could plausibly take baking powder specify the brand by name and in level teaspoons -- part of a long campaign by the chemical-leavening firms to teach cooks that exact measurement mattered, and that their tin was the one to measure from. "Cream cake" here refers to the filling rather than to cream in the batter, a common naming habit in American layer-cake recipes of the period, when a plain butter cake was defined chiefly by what was spread between its layers.