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Cream Cakes
Grease thoroughly with butter eight jelly-cake tins, and have a hot oven ready so that the cakes may be put into it as soon as possible after they are mixed. Stir two breakfast cupfuls of flour with one breakfast cupful of sugar and rub them well together; put two tablespoonfuls of bicarbonate of soda and two dessertspoonfuls of cream of tartar on a plate, and with the back of a spoon rub out the lumps, and mix them with the sugar and flour. Make a hole in the center of the flour, and drop in and mix, one at a time, the yolks of eight or nine eggs; whip the white of the eggs to a stiff froth, and stir this into the batter. Place an equal portion of the batter in each of the eight cake-tins, and bake in the oven for seven minutes. While the cakes are in the oven put one pint of milk and one teacupful of salt into a saucepan, and let boil; beat two eggs very lightly and stir them into four tablespoonfuls of powdered sugar and two tablespoonfuls of flour. When the milk boils, take it from the fire, allow it to cool for a minute or so, then pour it over the mixture of eggs, flour and sugar, stir well together and pour back into the saucepan; keep on stirring and let it boil for one minute. Remove the saucepan from the fire and drop into it twelve drops of essence of almonds. Take the cakes from the tins, place them on a dish, one on top of the other, with a layer of cream from the saucepan between them, sprinkle a little white powdered sugar over the top.
A quick soda-raised sponge baked in thin layers and stacked with pastry cream. Two of the quantities as printed are almost certainly compositor's errors, and the recipe will not work unless you recognise them.
- The salt is a misprintThe salt is almost certainly a misprint -- a teacupful of salt in a pint of milk is on the order of half a pound and would render the cream inedible. Comparable pastry creams of the period call for sugar in this position, with salt at most a pinch; treat the line accordingly.
- The leavening is also out of proportionTwo tablespoons of bicarbonate to two dessertspoons (four teaspoons) of cream of tartar inverts the usual ratio, which is roughly two parts cream of tartar to one part soda. As written the batter would be strongly alkaline, soapy on the tongue and yellow-brown in the crumb. Modern practice would use about a teaspoon of soda to two of cream of tartar for this much flour, or simply substitute baking powder.
- Cup and spoon sizesA breakfast cup is about 8 to 10 fl oz, so read it as a standard cup; a teacup is nearer 6 oz. A dessertspoon is two teaspoons, half a tablespoon.
- Jelly-cake tinsThese are shallow round layer pans, typically 8 or 9 inches, filled thinly so the cake bakes in minutes. Eight of them stacked gives a tall many-layered cake; four pans baked twice will do the same work.
- A hot ovenSomewhere in the region of 400 to 450F. The seven-minute bake depends on it, and on the layers being genuinely thin. The batter is a foam with no fat, so it deflates quickly once mixed, which is why the tins and oven are prepared first.
- Folding, not stirringThe whipped whites are the only real lift once the soda has spent itself. Fold them in with a spatula until barely combined rather than stirring, and get the pans into the oven at once.
- The creamTempering is the point of pouring the hot milk onto the egg, flour and sugar before returning it to the pan. Boil it a full minute so the flour loses its raw taste, then cool it before it touches the cake or it will soak the layers to pulp.
- Essence of almondsNineteenth-century almond essence was frequently based on bitter-almond oil, which can be considerably stronger, and more toxic, than what is sold now. Twelve drops of modern almond extract is a reasonable amount for a pint of cream; do not scale up in the belief that today's product is weaker.
- YieldEight thin layers make one cake serving ten to twelve. It is best eaten the day it is made, as the custard softens the sponge overnight.
Oscar Tschirky, the Swiss-born maitre d'hotel whose name carried the Waldorf's reputation for some fifty years, published his Cook Book in 1896 as a compendium of hotel and household cookery rather than a record of restaurant secrets, and much of it reads like the domestic manuals of the day. "Cream cakes" here means the older American sense: thin layers of sponge stacked with boiled custard, a construction related to Boston cream pie and to the countless jelly cakes of the period, which took their name from the jelly spread between the layers, the shallow tins being sold for the purpose. The chemical leavening is characteristic of the moment: soda and cream of tartar measured separately and rubbed smooth on a plate appears constantly in recipes of these decades, alongside commercial baking powders, which had been on the market since the 1850s and were the subject of recurring disputes over alum and other adulterants.