Home › Cakes › Lady Baltimore Cake
Lady Baltimore Cake
(From a famous recipe)
6 eggs
4 ounces granulated sugar
Pinch of cream of tartar
(about 8 tablespoons)
Pinch of salt
4 ounces almond paste
Sugar
(about 8 tablespoons)
Flour
4 egg-yolks
1 teaspoon baking-powder
¼ pound shredded citron
2 cups milk
½ cup pecan nut-meats
2 ounces grated chocolate
Soft boiled frosting flavored
(about 10 tablespoons) with vanilla
This cake is made in three parts: cake, chocolate-cream filling and nut cream.
For the cake, weigh five eggs and take their weight in sugar (about one and one-fourth cup), weigh three eggs and take their weight in flour (about one and one-half cup). Separate whites from yolks of six eggs, add cream of tartar and salt to the whites and beat until very stiff and dry. Beat the yolks as dry as possible, and add to them the sugar, then fold in the whites quickly. Sift the flour three times, with the baking-powder, and whip into the mixture. Bake about three-quarters of an hour in an oven that slowly rises in temperature, keeping a piece of paper over the top of the pan. When cold, cut into three layers, with a sharp knife.
For the chocolate cream, heat one cup of milk in a double boiler with two ounces of sugar and two ounces of almond paste, add the chocolate, melted, and the beaten yolks of two eggs. Set aside to cool.
For the nut cream, heat one cup of milk in the double boiler with two ounces of sugar and two ounces of almond paste, add the shredded citron and the pecan-meats ground in a vegetable grinder, and thicken with two egg-yolks.
When both creams are cool enough, spread the layers, using the nut filling for the bottom layer, the chocolate for the second and the boiled frosting for the top of the cake.
The almond paste may be bought at a confectioner's, or the almonds may be blanched and pounded. One and one-third cup of shelled almonds makes four ounces of paste.
The ingredient column has been scrambled in printing — quantities and items have drifted out of alignment — so the method paragraph, not the list, is the reliable document. Work from the instructions and treat the list as a check.
- Reading the ingredient listThe citron reads a quarter pound, as printed. The parenthetical tablespoon figures still sit beside entries they do not match and cannot be reassigned with confidence. The method calls for six eggs plus four extra yolks (two for each cream), 4 ounces almond paste split between the two fillings, and 2 cups milk split likewise.
- Weighing eggs for spongeThe old proportion — sugar equal to the weight of five eggs, flour equal to three — assumes eggs in shell of somewhere near 2 oz each. The recipe supplies its own cup figures, about 1¼ cups sugar and 1½ cups sifted flour, and modern large eggs are close enough to make those a fair reading.
- "An oven that slowly rises in temperature"A survival from wood- and coal-range baking. In a modern oven this would mean starting low and finishing moderate; the paper laid over the pan keeps the top pale while the centre sets. The recipe allows about three-quarters of an hour.
- The hinge: the two creamsBoth fillings are egg-yolk custards. Hold them in the double boiler until they coat a spoon, around 175F, and take them off there. Let them reach a boil and the yolks curdle, which no amount of beating fixes.
- Almond pasteBuy the block kind sold for marzipan work, not almond filling in a can, which is sweetened and loose. Warm it and mash it into the hot milk in small pieces or it will stay in lumps.
- Vegetable grinderA hand-cranked mincer. A food processor does the pecans in short pulses; run it long and you get pecan butter, which makes the nut cream greasy.
- CitronCandied citron peel, still sold around the winter holidays and from baking suppliers. Shred it fine — coarse pieces sit as hard nuggets in a soft filling.
- Soft boiled frostingHot sugar syrup beaten into egg whites, meringue-style. "Soft" here presumably means taking the syrup no further than it needs to go to stay spreadable rather than setting hard; frostings of this kind tend to weep after a day or so.
- Assembly and yieldAssembly -- The creams must be quite cold before spreading or the layers slide; chill the assembled cake before frosting the top.
Lady Baltimore cake owes its name to Owen Wister's 1906 novel Lady Baltimore, set in a thinly disguised Charleston, in which the narrator eats a cake of that name at a tearoom — the book was a bestseller and the cake became a fixture of American cookbooks within a few years. The version that stuck is a white layer cake with a filling of figs, raisins and nuts bound in boiled frosting, which makes this recipe an oddity: a whole-egg sponge with two cooked almond-milk creams, one chocolate and one studded with citron and pecans. That is a pâtissier's cake rather than a Southern one, and the coy "from a famous recipe" suggests it came to the editors by way of a hotel or confectioner's kitchen with the name attached and little else. The pecans and the boiled frosting are the only clear links to the Charleston original. Almond paste bought "at a confectioner's" is itself a period marker — this was a specialty purchase, and the note on pounding your own from blanched almonds is there for readers with no confectioner nearby.