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Mountain Cakes
Pound cake baked on jelly cake pans, 4 or 5 or more of the sheets piled on each other with cake icing spread between, and on the top. Decorate the top with the kernels of hickory nuts.
A skeleton recipe of the kind written for cooks who already knew pound cake by heart. The whole trick is baking the batter thin enough that four or five stacked sheets read as one tall cake.
- Jelly cake pansShallow round tins, typically around 8 to 9 inches across with low sides — what a modern kitchen would call a sponge or layer tin. Batter goes in barely half an inch deep, so each sheet bakes in a fraction of the time a loaf pound cake wants — figure roughly 12 to 18 minutes and watch it.
- Pound cake, unspecifiedThe book assumes the standard proportion: equal weights of butter, sugar, eggs and flour, creamed and beaten hard, with no chemical leavening. One pound of each will fill four to five jelly pans. If you use a modern pound cake with baking powder, the layers will dome and need levelling.
- Oven heatThe recipe gives none. Thin sheets of a rich butter batter colour fast at the edges, so watch from ten minutes and pull them when the centre springs back.
- Cake icingPeriod cake icing here means either a boiled white icing (sugar syrup beaten into egg white) or a plain uncooked one of confectioners' sugar and water or cream. Both set firm, which suits a tall stack; a modern buttercream stays softer.
- Hickory nutsShagbark hickory kernels were gathered wild across the Midwest and East and are seldom sold now. Pecans are the closest relative in flavour and the standard substitute; walnuts read as sharper.
- AssemblyTrim the sheets to a common diameter before stacking, and ice each layer thinly — with five layers a generous hand puts more icing than cake in the cross-section. Chill briefly before cutting so the stack holds.
- YieldA one-pound formula built into four or five layers gives a substantial cake. Pound cake keeps well wrapped for several days; the boiled icing is best the day it is made.
Jessup Whitehead wrote for the working hotel and restaurant trade in Chicago in the 1880s and '90s, which is why entries like this one read as memoranda rather than recipes — the reader already owned a pound cake formula and needed only the shape and the finish. The name may come from the height: a stack of four or five thin sheets rising well above an ordinary layer cake, in the same spirit as the "stack cakes" of the southern Appalachians, though the book does not say so. Shagbark hickories were a commonplace autumn gathering across the Midwest and Upper South and were sold in city markets, and cookbooks of the period call for them much as later ones call for pecans.