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Bride's Cake
Whites of twelve eggs, three cups sugar, small cup butter, a cup sweet milk, four small cups flour, half cup corn-starch, two tea spoons baking-powder, lemon to taste. Adding a cup citron sliced thin and dusted with flour, makes a beautiful citron cake. -Mrs. Harvey Clark, Piqua.
A late nineteenth-century white cake that relies on twelve stiffly beaten egg whites for much of its lift. The instructions assume a cook who already knows how to cream butter and sugar and bake a layer cake, so the gaps are in measurement and oven management.
- The cups are not standard"small cup" and "four small cups" are the writer's own vessels, not a graduated measure. Read the butter as roughly 3/4 cup (170 g) and the flour as perhaps 3 1/2 cups, though neither can be fixed with any confidence; the batter should be thick but pourable, and it is safer to hold back some flour than to add it all at once.
- No oven temperature is givenFor a cake of this size, about 350F in three 9-inch layers, 25-30 minutes; as a single deep cake, 325F for 50-60 minutes so the outside does not colour before the centre sets.
- Egg whites are the leaveningEgg whites carry much of the lift -- two teaspoons of baking powder is modest for this quantity of batter. Beat the whites to soft, glossy peaks and fold them in last in two or three additions rather than beating them in wholesale, which knocks out the air.
- FlourNineteenth-century household flour was generally softer than modern all-purpose, closer to cake or pastry flour. Substituting cake flour, or replacing two tablespoons per cup of all-purpose with cornstarch, gives a crumb nearer the original; the half cup of cornstarch already in the recipe may be doing much the same job.
- Baking powderPowders of the 1880s were single-acting and varied in strength between brands. With modern double-acting powder, two level teaspoons is ample; do not round the spoons.
- "Lemon to taste"Probably lemon extract, a common flavouring of the day, at roughly a teaspoon to a teaspoon and a half. Grated zest works and tastes better, but adds flecks to a cake whose whole point is whiteness.
- CitronCandied citron peel, still sold at holidays and in Middle Eastern groceries. Slicing it thin and dusting it with flour keeps it suspended rather than sinking; the same trick applies to any candied fruit.
- YieldEnough for three 9-inch layers or a large tube cake, serving 16-20. Twelve yolks are left over: curd, custard or a gold cake.
White cake as "bride's cake" belongs to a nineteenth-century convention that paired a pale, egg-white cake for the bride with a dark, fruit-and-spice groom's cake at the same wedding, the whiteness generally read as a symbol of purity and, just as practically, as a display of expensive refined sugar and finely bolted flour. The Dixie Cook Book, like the Buckeye books it grew out of, was assembled from contributed recipes credited by name and town, and Mrs. Harvey Clark of Piqua is one of hundreds of such contributors; the note that adding citron "makes a beautiful citron cake" is typical of the genre's thrift, one batter doing two jobs.