Jelly Cake
3 eggs 1 cup flour. 1 cup powdered sugar 1 tablespoon milk Pinch of salt I level teaspoon Calumet Baking Powder Sift flour, salt and baking powder together thoroughly. Beat whites and yolks of eggs separately. Mix sugar with beaten yolks, and add sifted flour, stirring gently; then add whites of eggs and milk. Mix thoroughly and pour into three jelly-cake plates and bake from 5 to 10 minutes in a well-heated oven; when cold spread with currant jelly, place each layer on top of the other, and sift powdered sugar on top. (See illustration, page 62.) 3½ cups pastry flour 3½ cup
A butterless sponge batter baked in three thin layers and stacked with jelly — the sort of cake a baking powder company liked to advertise, since it stands or falls on the leavening. The ingredient list as printed has been mangled, so read the numbers with suspicion before you start.
- The missing egg countThe flour and milk quantities were checked against the printed page and stand as given. No egg count appears in the ingredient list, though the method calls for whites and yolks beaten separately; three to four eggs suit this style of sponge. Beat them separately as directed and fold the whites in last.
- Powdered sugar, two sensesIn American books of this era "powdered sugar" usually means a fine granulated sugar, not the cornstarch-cut confectioners' sugar sold under that name today. For the sugar sifted over the finished top, modern confectioners' sugar is right; for the sugar beaten into the yolks, superfine (caster) sugar behaves closest to the original.
- Jelly-cake platesThese were shallow tin layer pans, roughly 8 to 9 inches across with sides under an inch high — the point is a thin layer that bakes through in minutes. Modern 8-inch round cake pans work, but grease and flour them and expect a flatter layer than the pan depth suggests.
- "A well-heated oven"The book gives no temperature; for layers this thin a hot oven, probably somewhere around 400F, is the modern equivalent. Too cool an oven dries a thin sponge out before it sets.
- Watch it, do not time itFive to ten minutes is a wide window for something that can overbake in sixty seconds. Start checking at five minutes: the layer should spring back when pressed in the centre and be barely coloured at the edges.
- Pastry flourLow-protein pastry flour is still sold and is what this wants. All-purpose flour will work with the coarser texture you would expect; replacing about two tablespoons of flour per cup with cornstarch is the usual workaround.
- Folding, not stirringThe whole rise here comes from beaten whites plus a single teaspoon of baking powder, with no butter to carry air. Fold the whites in with a spatula until just combined — "mix thoroughly" in 1900 print did not mean beat the air out.
- The jellyCurrant jelly spreads badly cold. Stir it smooth, or warm it briefly and let it cool to a spreadable gel; then assemble on fully cooled layers so it does not soak through. Sift the sugar over just before serving, as it dissolves on standing.
- YieldThree thin 8-inch layers give a cake that cuts into 8 to 10 slices. It is best the day it is made; a butterless sponge stales quickly.
Reliable Recipes was published by the Calumet Baking Powder Company of Chicago, founded in 1889, and like the promotional cookbooks issued by Royal, Rumford and Davis it exists to put the brand name into the middle of a recipe — hence "1 level teaspoon Calumet Baking Powder" where an ordinary cookbook would say simply baking powder. Jelly cake itself is older than any of these companies: thin sponge layers sandwiched with fruit jelly appear in American manuscript and printed receipt books through the middle of the nineteenth century. The shallow "jelly-cake plate" was standard tinware, and a similar batter baked in one sheet and rolled was the jelly roll. The cross-reference to an illustration on page 62 is a reminder that these books sold themselves partly on pictures of finished cakes.