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Choice Fig Cake
A large cup butter, two and a half of sugar, one of sweet milk, three pints flour with three tea-spoons baking-powder, whites of sixteen eggs, a pound and a quarter of figs well floured and cut in strips like citron; no flavoring. -Mrs. A. B. Morey.
A white cake in the nineteenth-century mould: no yolks, no flavoring, the figs cut and floured so they behave like candied citron in a fruit cake. The original gives no pan, oven or time, so those are the gaps to fill.
- The measurements, in modern termsA "large cup" of butter is about 8 oz (2 sticks); two and a half cups sugar is roughly 1 lb 2 oz. Three pints of flour means six cups by volume, somewhere around 24-30 oz depending on how it was scooped; sifting before measuring gives the lighter end of that range.
- Sixteen egg whitesThat is roughly 2 cups, or 16 fl oz, of whites by modern large-egg measure. Eggs of the period were often somewhat smaller, so measuring the whites by volume is safer than counting strictly to sixteen. The yolks keep a day or two refrigerated for custard or a gold cake.
- Sweet milkSimply fresh unsoured whole milk, specified to distinguish it from the buttermilk or sour milk used with saleratus in other recipes of the period.
- Leavening is scant by modern standardsThree teaspoons of baking powder for six cups of flour is well under the current rule of about a teaspoon per cup. Period baking powder was single-acting and the recipe leans heavily on the beaten whites for lift, so beat them to firm peaks and fold, do not stir.
- The figsDried figs, stemmed and cut into thin strips, tossed in flour from the measured quantity so they stay suspended rather than sinking. Tough or leathery figs benefit from a brief soak in warm water and a thorough drying before they are floured.
- Pan and ovenThe original gives no pan, oven or time. This is a very large batter, more than a single 10-inch tube pan will hold; divide it between two or three well buttered and lined pans. As a modern starting point, bake at 325-350F for about an hour and a quarter to an hour and a half, testing with a skewer at the centre. Tent with foil if the top colours before the middle sets.
- "No flavoring" is deliberateThe instruction is part of the recipe, not an omission: the point is a plain white crumb that lets the figs carry the flavour. Adding vanilla or lemon changes the cake the author intended.
- YieldA cake of this size serves 16 to 20. It keeps well wrapped for several days, and the crumb is firmer and easier to slice on the second day.
The Dixie Cook Book belongs to the family of large compiled American household manuals of the 1880s, assembled from contributed recipes and printed with each donor's name attached - here Mrs. A. B. Morey, whose signature is as much a part of the entry as the ingredients. Cakes built on egg whites alone were a distinct nineteenth-century category, appearing under names like silver cake or white cake, and cookbooks of the period often printed them alongside a gold cake that used the leftover yolks. The figs point to the era's trade in dried Mediterranean fruit: pressed Smyrna figs reached American grocers in flat boxes, and here they stand in for candied citron, which the recipe explicitly invokes as the model for how to cut them. The absence of flavoring is worth noting too - vanilla extract and rose water were both available, and choosing neither was a stated preference rather than an oversight.