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Jelly Cakes
Beat eight ounces of sugar with five eggs, add one-fourth pound of melted butter, one teacupful of milk and twelve ounces of flour to which has been added one teaspoonful of baking powder. Spread this over some jelly-cake pans and when cooked put three of these, one on top of the other with jelly in between, and serve.
A plain butter sponge baked in thin layers and stacked with jelly, written in the shorthand of a professional kitchen that assumed the cook knew the rest. The weights are the reliable part; the volumes and the oven are left to you.
- Weights to cupsEight ounces of sugar is about 1 1/8 cups granulated; 12 ounces of flour is roughly 2 1/2 to 2 3/4 cups, depending on how it is measured. A quarter pound of butter is one US stick. Weighing gives a far more consistent crumb, and the dry ingredients here are given by weight.
- A teacupfulPeriod sources are not consistent: a teacupful is variously reckoned at anything from a gill to a half-pint, with about 6 fluid ounces the commonest reading. Try 3/4 cup of milk and hold back a spoonful if the batter seems loose.
- The ovenNo temperature is given. Thin layers of this kind want a moderate to moderately hot oven, 350-375F, for roughly 12 to 18 minutes, until the surface springs back and the edges just pull from the tin.
- Jelly-cake pansThese were shallow round tins, usually 8 or 9 inches, made for baking a single thin layer. Modern 9-inch round cake pans work; grease and line them, and expect the batter to fill four or five pans, not three.
- LeaveningOne teaspoon of baking powder for 12 ounces of flour is light by current practice, which suggests the five eggs are doing much of the lifting. Beat the eggs and sugar until pale and thick enough to ribbon before the butter goes in, or the layers may bake dense.
- Method orderAdd the melted butter warm but not hot, alternating with the milk, and fold the flour in last with as little working as possible. Overmixing after the flour is the usual cause of a tough jelly cake.
- The jellyUse a firm fruit jelly rather than a soft jam or preserve; currant and raspberry were common choices. Beat it smooth with a fork first so it spreads thinly without tearing the delicate layers.
- Yield and servingOne three-layer cake serves eight to ten, cut in wedges. The recipe calls for no frosting, only jelly between the layers; a dusting of sugar over the top is an optional finish.
Jelly cake was one of the most common American cakes of the nineteenth century, and it was closely associated with a piece of equipment: the jelly-cake pan, a shallow tin that let a household bake several thin layers at once in a small oven. Stacking those layers with jelly was a simple alternative to frosting, and the format spread through community and manufacturers' cookbooks for decades before the modern filled layer cake displaced it. Its appearance in Oscar Tschirky's book, published in 1896 while he was maitre d'hotel at the Waldorf, is a reminder that the volume is not purely a restaurant record; alongside the hotel's elaborate dishes it collects plain domestic baking of the sort any competent American cook of the period would have recognised, set down in the brief, assume-nothing-explained style of a kitchen professional.