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Fig Cake
Silver Part.-Two cups sugar, two-thirds cup butter, not quite two-thirds cup sweet milk, whites of eight eggs, three heaping teaspoons baking-powder thoroughly sifted, with three cups flour; stir sugar and butter to a cream, add milk and flour, and last white of eggs.
Gold Part. One cup sugar, three-fourths cup butter, half cup sweet milk, one and a half tea-spoons baking-powder sifted in a little more than one and a half cups flour, yolks of seven eggs thoroughly beaten, and one whole egg, one tea-spoon allspice, and cinnamon until you can taste it; bake the white in two long pie-tins. Put half the gold in a pie-tin, and lay on one pound halved figs (previously sifted over with flour), so that they will just touch each other; put on the rest of the gold, and bake. Put the cakes together with frosting while warm, the gold between the white ones, and cover with frosting.-Miss Tina Lay,
A three-layer gold-and-silver cake with a fig-studded middle. The recipe assumes you know how to run a creamed butter cake and gives no oven heat, no time and no pan size, so the guidance below fills those gaps.
- Sweet milkPlain whole milk, so called to distinguish it from soured or buttermilk, which would have called for saleratus instead of baking powder.
- Long pie-tinsShallow oblong or oval tins of the sort used for layer cakes; the recipe gives no size. Use three shallow tins of matching size, two for the silver batter and one for the gold; grease and line the bases.
- Oven heatBake at 350F. The silver layers will take about 25 to 30 minutes, the gold layer longer -- 35 to 45 minutes -- because of the fruit and the greater depth of batter.
- Baking powderNineteenth-century baking powders are generally reckoned to have been weaker and less consistent than modern double-acting powder. Three heaping teaspoons to three cups of flour is a little generous by current practice, where about one level teaspoon per cup of flour is usual; going well over it can leave a soapy aftertaste and a coarse crumb.
- The figsFigs, halved and most likely dried, dusted with flour so they grip the batter instead of sinking. Sandwiching them between two pours of gold batter is the whole trick -- the fruit should sit in a single layer, just touching, suspended in the middle of the baked layer.
- Cinnamon until you can taste itRead this as about a teaspoon of cinnamon against the teaspoon of allspice already called for. More than that and the spice buries the egg-yolk richness that makes the gold part worth having.
- Frosting while warmAssembling warm helps a boiled or plain water icing set into the crumb and hold the stack together, but the layers should be no more than barely warm or the icing will slide. A cooked white frosting, beaten until it holds a peak, suits the cake better than a modern buttercream.
- Egg managementEight whites go into the silver batter and seven yolks plus one whole egg into the gold, which means separating eight eggs and adding a ninth. Fold the beaten whites in last and only until no streaks remain.
- YieldA tall three-layer cake serving 12 to 16. The two batters together use about four and a half cups of flour, so this is a large cake by any standard.
Gold-and-silver cakes were a standard Victorian answer to a practical problem: any recipe built on beaten whites left a bowl of yolks behind, and any yolk-rich cake left whites. Baking both and stacking them turned thrift into a show piece, and the contrast of pale, fine-grained white cake against the deeper yellow spiced layer was the point of the exercise. The Dixie Cook Book, first published in the 1880s, belongs to the community-cookbook tradition, and Miss Tina Lay's fig cake is typical of what such books collected. Figs grew well across the Gulf South, and the fruit turns up in preserves, puddings and cakes throughout the region's nineteenth-century cookery.