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Vanilla (Follow recipe for mixing)
Follow recipe for mixing butter cakes. Bake in layers. and put between layers and on top Ice Cream Frosting.
This is a variation entry, not a standalone recipe: it assumes you already have the book's butter cake formula and its Ice Cream Frosting in front of you. What follows fills in the gaps a modern cook will hit.
- The missing base recipeThis entry gives no proportions; it depends entirely on the book's own butter cake formula. Plain butter cakes of the period commonly run in the region of half a cup butter, a cup of sugar, two eggs, half a cup of milk, flour and baking powder, but use whatever the book actually gives. The point of this entry is only the flavouring and the assembly.
- Where the vanilla goesThe recipe gives no quantity; about a teaspoon of extract is the usual modern allowance. It is commonly added with the milk, after the eggs, though many recipes of the period beat flavouring into the creamed butter and sugar instead.
- Mixing butter cakesFollow the book's own mixing directions. The usual pattern is to cream butter and sugar, beat in the eggs (yolks only if the base recipe separates them, with the whites folded in last), then work in the flour and milk.
- Pan sizeThe recipe says only 'bake in layers' and specifies neither number nor size; round layer tins of 8 or 9 inches are the usual modern substitute. Grease and flour them, or line the bottoms, before filling.
- Ice Cream FrostingNothing frozen is involved. Frostings under this name are generally boiled sugar syrup beaten into stiff egg whites, though the origin of the name is not documented. Check the book's own recipe, and spread it while it still holds a shape.
- YieldDepends on the tin size and number of layers, neither of which the recipe states; two 8- or 9-inch layers would serve eight to ten. Keep it covered at room temperature rather than chilled, as boiled frostings do not hold well in the refrigerator.
By this period, an American cookbook's cake chapter worked like a system: one master butter cake, then a short paragraph for each variation telling you what to add and how to bake and finish it. This entry is one of those paragraphs, and its brevity is a sign of how thoroughly the layer cake had been standardised in the late nineteenth century, once chemical baking powder had come into general use. Vanilla itself had become cheap enough to be the default flavour only in the preceding decades; the vine is notoriously difficult to fruit outside its native range, and large-scale cultivation on Indian Ocean islands is generally traced to the hand-pollination method developed there in the 1840s. Commercial extract followed.