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Almond Cake
Two cups sugar, three-fourths cup butter, one of sweet milk, two of flour, and one of corn starch well mixed, whites of six eggs, two tea-spoons cream tartar in the flour, one tea-spoon soda in the milk; cream the butter and sugar, add milk gradually, then the whites of eggs together with the flour, and bake in jelly-tins. To put between layers, take two pounds almonds, blanch and pound fine in a mortar (or a cloth will do), beat whites and yolks of two eggs together lightly, add a cup and a half sugar, then the almonds, with one table-spoon vanilla. - Mrs. Harvey Wood.
A white layer cake of the standard 1880s type, sound enough in itself, paired with an almond filling that is never cooked. The filling is the problem.
- The uncooked fillingThe almond layer is raw egg — whites and yolks beaten with sugar, almonds and vanilla — spread between cooled cake layers and never heated. Nothing in the method brings the eggs anywhere near the 160F at which Salmonella is destroyed, and the cake then sits at room temperature while it is cut and served. Use a current recipe for a cooked almond custard, an almond buttercream, or a filling built on pasteurized egg product.
- Two pounds of almondsThat is roughly 6 cups of nuts against a cup and a half of sugar for a filling meant to spread between two or three thin layers — far more than the cake can carry. Even in a cooked version the proportion wants cutting to a quarter of it.
- Sweet milkPlain whole milk. The word distinguishes it from the sour milk or buttermilk that older recipes call for when the leavening is soda alone.
- Cream of tartar and sodaThis is a pre-packaged-baking-powder formula: the acid goes into the flour, the alkali into the liquid, and they meet in the bowl. Two teaspoons cream of tartar plus one of soda is the classic 2:1 ratio, equivalent to about four teaspoons of modern double-acting baking powder for this quantity of flour.
- Corn starchSubstituting a full cup of cornstarch for a third of the flour is the old trick for a tender, close-grained white crumb — the same principle as modern cake flour. It is not a thickener here.
- Jelly-tinsShallow round layer pans, typically somewhere between eight and ten inches across and an inch or so deep. The batter, which is large, would fill three or four of them.
- OvenThe recipe gives no oven direction. In modern terms, thin layers of this kind want roughly 350F for 18 to 25 minutes — until the top springs back and the edges pull from the pan.
- Pounding almondsA mortar or a cloth and rolling pin gives an oily, slightly coarse paste. A food processor does the same work, but pulse it: run continuously and the almonds pack into butter.
Almond cake in a book like The Dixie Cook Book (1883) is a show cake — the recipe spends six egg whites and two pounds of almonds, both expensive. Cream of tartar and soda measured separately, as here, was the older practice, still common in household books even after commercial baking powders had reached the shops. The attribution to Mrs. Harvey Wood is typical of the compiled cookbook, which gathered signed contributions and printed them much as they were written, ambiguous proportions and all.