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Lady Cake
Take one pound of caster-sugar, half a pound of flour, half a pound of butter, the whites of fourteen eggs, and mix well together. Flavor with two drops of oil of bitter almonds and bake on a buttered tin.
The problem here is a single line: two drops of oil of bitter almonds. That ingredient, as sold and used in 1896, is not something to put in a cake today.
- Oil of bitter almondsUnrectified bitter almond oil is roughly 2-4 percent hydrocyanic acid (prussic acid) by weight, produced when amygdalin in the kernel meets water and enzyme. Nineteenth-century flavoring bottles were sold at wildly variable strength and purity, and household poisonings from them were common enough to be a standard topic in period medical texts. Two drops from an unknown bottle is not a measurable dose of anything.
- Why substitution does not rescue the pageModern almond extract is a benzaldehyde flavoring with the cyanide removed, and it is not interchangeable drop for drop with what Oscar meant. A cook who wants a lady cake should work from a current recipe that specifies extract by the teaspoon.
- The recipe is also incompleteThere is no leavening, no oven temperature, no pan size and no baking time. "Bake on a buttered tin" assumed a cook who already knew the dish; a fourteen-white batter with a pound of sugar and only half a pound of flour needs far more direction than that to come out of the oven as cake.
- Caster-sugarSuperfine sugar, finer than granulated and coarser than confectioners'. It dissolves more readily than granulated, though this recipe specifies neither creaming the butter nor beating the whites.
- Fourteen whitesEggs of the period were often smaller than a modern large egg, though sizes varied widely and no exact equivalence can be given; this is one reason old cakes scaled by egg count can misbehave now.
Lady cake is the pale half of what is often said to be a nineteenth-century pair: a white cake of egg whites, butter and almond flavoring, set against the dark, spiced, yolk-and-fruit "gentleman's cake" that is traditionally described as using the leftover yolks. Recipes for it run through American and English household books from the 1830s onward, and the almond note is what distinguishes it from a plain white cake. Its presence in Oscar Tschirky's 1896 volume is a reminder that hotel kitchens of the period worked from the same domestic repertoire as the households that bought the book, and that a Waldorf recipe could be as terse as a line in a manuscript notebook, because the person reading it was assumed to have made the thing before.