Moonshine Cake
Whites 10 eggs 1/4 teaspoon salt. ⅞ teaspoon cream of tartar Yolks 7 eggs 1½ cups sugar 1 teaspoon almond extract 1 cup pastry flour Add salt to whites of eggs and beat until light. Sift in cream of tartar and beat until stiff. Beat yolks of eggs until thick and lemon colored and add two heaping tablespoons beaten whites. To remaining whites add gradually sugar measured after five siftings. Add almond extract and combine mixtures. Cut and fold in flour, measured after five siftings. Bake in angel-cake pan, first dipped in cold water, in a slow oven one hour. Have a pan of hot water in oven during the baking. Cover with Maraschino Frosting. Follow recipe for Ice Cream Frosting (see p. 528), adding to sugar one-half teaspoon cream of tartar, and flavor with maraschino. Sprinkle with almonds blanched, shredded, and baked until delicately browned. Whites 3 eggs
A large tube-pan sponge in the angel-cake family, using both whites and yolks. The transcription of the ingredient list is jumbled — the quantities need reading with care before you begin.
- The stray egg-white lineThe cream of tartar reads ⅞ teaspoon, as the printed page gives it. The ingredient list still ends with "Whites 3 eggs" set apart from the rest, after the frosting note; the method calls for beaten whites in the cake itself, and the seven yolks suggest the cake wants the whites of those same seven eggs. Treat the three whites as belonging to the frosting.
- Missing saltThe first instruction says to add salt to the whites, but no salt appears in the list. A quarter teaspoon is the usual amount for a cake of this size.
- Slow oven"Slow oven" in this period is generally taken as somewhere around 300–325F, though the book gives no figure here. A full hour at that heat suits a deep tube pan; the cake is done when it springs back and a skewer comes out clean, and cakes of this kind are usually inverted to cool.
- Pastry flourPastry flour here means a soft, low-protein flour. Modern cake flour is the closest match. If substituting all-purpose, remove two tablespoons per cup and replace with cornstarch, and be scrupulous about folding.
- Sifting five timesNot decoration. Both sugar and flour are measured after sifting, so the cup is deliberately underfilled by modern standards — roughly 3½ oz of flour and around 10 oz of sugar. Sifting also keeps the flour light enough to fold into a foam without deflating it.
- The panAn ungreased angel-cake (tube) pan, dipped in cold water rather than buttered; such pans commonly ran 9 to 10 inches. The batter must grip the sides to climb; grease defeats it. The pan of hot water in the oven adds humidity and moderates the heat.
- The hingeEverything depends on the folding. The yolks are lightened with two spoonfuls of white before the mixtures meet, then the flour is cut and folded in. Stir and the foam collapses; there is no chemical leavening to rescue it.
- The frostingIce cream frosting of this period is generally a boiled-sugar syrup beaten into egg whites, close to an Italian meringue, which fits the direction to add cream of tartar to the sugar; the recipe itself is on p. 528. Maraschino here is the cherry liqueur, not the syrup from a jar of modern cocktail cherries.
- YieldA 10-inch tube cake serving 12 to 14.
"Moonshine" was a familiar nineteenth-century name for pale, airy desserts and cakes, in the same sense as moonshine in ordinary speech — something bright but weightless. Cakes of this kind belong to the vogue for foam cakes in the later 1800s, when cheap uniform baking pans and finely milled white flour became widely available: angel cake using whites only, gold cake using yolks, and hybrids like this one using both. The five siftings, the water-dipped pan and the pan of hot water in the oven are all marks of a period when leavening came from beaten egg alone and a cook had few instruments beyond her own judgement to control a range.