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Cake Mixtures and Puddings (Add flour and milk alternately)
4. Add flour and milk alternately, adding just enough of the last third of the milk to make a soft drop batter. 5. Bake in a moderate oven.
Note. This cake may be baked in two layers and put together with uncooked icing.
Uncooked Icing. 1 egg white 7 R. t. powdered sugar 1. Beat egg white very stiff. 1 t. lemon juice or 1 2 1/2 t. flavoring extract 2. Add sugar 1 t. at a time beating with Dover egg beater after each addition. 3. Add flavoring and spread icing between layers and on top of cake.
This page is the tail end of a plain cake method plus a companion icing. The cake steps are ordinary, but the icing is a raw-egg-white frosting that receives no heat at any point.
- Why the icing fails todayThe white is beaten with sugar and spread on a cooled cake, so it never reaches a temperature that would kill Salmonella Enteritidis, which can be present inside intact shell eggs. Sugar and a teaspoon of lemon juice do not make the mixture safe; there is no cooking step and no holding time at temperature. Use a current icing recipe instead.
- Where the recipe startsWhat survives here is steps 4 and 5 of a cake method; the earlier steps, including the mixing of fat, sugar and eggs and whatever leavening was used, are on the preceding page. Treated on its own this fragment cannot be followed.
- "Moderate oven"The book gives no figure; in this period the term was generally taken to mean something in the region of 350F. No baking time is given and none can be derived from the page.
- Soft drop batterThe instruction to hold back part of the last third of the milk is the working point of the method. The batter should fall from a spoon in a soft lump rather than pour, and flours vary enough that the full quantity of milk is not always wanted.
- The abbreviationsT. is presumably teaspoon and R. t. a rounded teaspoon, though the key is not on this page. Seven rounded teaspoons is a small quantity, perhaps a quarter of a cup, consistent with a thin filling and top coat rather than a fully frosted cake.
- "Powdered sugar"In American cookery of this period the term often meant granulated sugar ground fine, not the modern confectioners' sugar that carries added cornstarch. The two behave differently: the older product dissolves in the white, the modern one thickens partly by starch.
- Dover egg beaterA hand-cranked rotary beater, in wide use from the 1870s onward and common in domestic-science kitchens.
Household arts manuals of the early twentieth century were built around a handful of master mixtures rather than long lists of individual cakes, which is why this page reads as a numbered procedure with a note attached: the same batter becomes a loaf, a layer cake, or cupcakes depending on the pan, and the pupil was expected to learn the proportion and the handling rather than memorise a dish. Uncooked icing sat alongside boiled icing in these books as the quicker of two options, and its appearance here may owe something to the constraints of the classroom, since a beaten white and sugar could be finished in a single lesson period while a boiled syrup icing needed a hot range and time. The stipulation of the Dover beater also dates the page: rotary beaters made stiffly beaten whites a routine schoolroom task, where a generation earlier it had meant several minutes' work with a fork.