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Blue-Grass Cake
Two cups each of butter and corn-starch, three of sugar, one of sweet milk, six of flour, whites of fourteen eggs, one tea-spoon soda, two tea-spoons cream of tartar. Cream the butter and sugar well, add the milk, then the corn-starch, sift the cream of tartar in the flour (stirring it well together), add the flour and well-beaten whites alternately, bake in a loaf. When it is done and cold, with a long knife cut it through the middle, make an icing of one-half cup of sugar and just enough water to dissolve sugar, boil until it will spin a thread in dropping from a spoon, then stir in the well-beaten whites of four eggs, flavor to taste; take one pound of fresh figs, one pound of raisins, and one pound of almonds or hickory-nuts, chop the fruit very fine, blanch the almonds or prepare the hickory-nut meats, chop slightly, and stir all in the icing; put a layer between the cake, and on top and all over the side. This is a delicious cake
A very large white cake in the cornstarch style popular in the 1880s, finished with a boiled icing packed with three pounds of fruit and nuts. Read the quantities before you start: this is a party-sized bake, not a weeknight loaf.
- Scale firstSix cups of flour, two cups of cornstarch, a pound of butter and fourteen egg whites make something in the range of 12-14 cups of batter. Half the recipe fills a 10-inch tube pan comfortably; the full quantity needs two large pans or a deep 12-inch tin.
- Cup measuresTwo cups of butter is one pound, four sticks. Two cups of cornstarch is roughly 9 oz. Here it is used alongside the full six cups of flour rather than in place of any of it, and it gives the fine, tight, pale crumb associated with cornstarch cakes.
- Sweet milkSimply fresh unsoured milk, as opposed to the buttermilk or clabbered milk that appears elsewhere in the book. Whole milk is the right substitute.
- The leaveningOne teaspoon soda with two teaspoons cream of tartar is homemade baking powder, near enough 4 teaspoons of the modern commercial kind. Sift the cream of tartar through the flour as directed and do not let the batter stand once the two meet.
- Bake in a loafHere "a loaf" means one tall cake rather than layers, and it is later split. The recipe gives no oven guidance; for a modern oven try 325-350F and a long bake, expecting well over an hour for a cake this deep, with a tent of foil if the top colours early.
- Spin a threadThe syrup stage is 230-235F on a thermometer, the soft end of the scale. Pour it into the beaten whites in a thin steady stream while whipping.
- The icing is undersizedHalf a cup of sugar and four whites will not coat, fill and cover the sides of a cake carrying three pounds of chopped figs, raisins and nuts. Plan on tripling the syrup and whites, or reducing the fruit sharply.
- Uncooked whitesThe small quantity of hot syrup does not bring the four whites to a pasteurising temperature, so this icing is essentially raw egg white. Pasteurised whites give the same result if the cake is for children, elderly guests or anyone pregnant.
- Nuts and yolksHickory nuts are close in flavour to pecans, which substitute directly; blanch almonds by pouring boiling water over them and slipping off the skins. Eighteen yolks are left over, fourteen from the cake and four from the icing -- custard, curd or mayonnaise the same day.
The bluegrass is central Kentucky, and cakes named for it turn up across late nineteenth-century Southern and Midwestern collections as a regional badge on what is otherwise a fashionable white cake. Two things place it loosely in its period: the cornstarch, which was newly cheap and heavily advertised in the 1870s and 80s as the way to a snow-white, fine-grained crumb, and the fourteen egg whites, a display of plenty that is often taken to suggest a household with eggs to spare and a use for the yolks, though neither detail can fix a date. The Dixie Cook-Book (1883) drew much of its structure from the Buckeye Cookery tradition, and its cake chapter reads as an inventory of what an ambitious household could achieve with white sugar, white flour and separated eggs. The fig, raisin and almond icing anticipates the fruit-and-nut boiled frostings later associated with Lady Baltimore cake, though the connection between them is a matter of shared fashion rather than documented descent.