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Hard-Money Cake
T Gold Part.-Yolks of eight eggs, scant cup butter, two of sugar, four of flour, one of sour milk, tea-spoon soda, table-spoon corn Gold Part.-Yolks of eight eggs, scant cup butter, two of sugar, starch; flavor with lemon and vanilla.
Silver Part.-Two cups sugar, one of butter, four (scant) of flour, one of sour milk, tea-spoon soda, table-spoon corn starch, whites of eight eggs; flavor with almond or peach. Put in pan, alternately, one spoonful of gold and one of silver. - Miss Emma Fisher.
Two full batters, spooned into the pan in alternating dollops to marble yellow against white. It is a very large cake by modern standards — sixteen eggs in total — so plan the pan before you start mixing.
- Volume, first of allEach batter uses four cups of flour and two of sugar; together that is a batch of roughly eight cups of flour. Bake in a 10-inch tube pan plus a loaf, or divide between two 10-inch tube pans. A single standard bundt will overflow.
- Sour milk and sodaThe soda has nothing to react with unless the milk is genuinely acidic. Use cultured buttermilk, or clabbered milk, rather than fresh milk left to sour on the counter. The recipe's teaspoon of soda to a cup of sour milk is on the generous side of later practice; get the batter into the pan promptly once mixed.
- Corn starchThe tablespoon of corn starch is a tenderizer. Measure it as part of the four cups of flour rather than in addition, or the crumb tightens.
- The eggs are the leavening tooEight eggs, separated between the two batters, and no baking powder anywhere; the soda and sour milk are the only chemical lift. Whip the eight whites for the silver part to soft, glossy peaks and fold them in last; beat the eight yolks for the gold part until pale and thick. Both batters depend on that air.
- Butter measuresA "scant cup" of butter is a little under two sticks, call it 210 g; the silver part's full cup is 227 g. Cream it with the sugar until distinctly lightened before anything else goes in.
- OvenThe recipe gives no temperature. Bake at 325F for a cake this deep -- hot enough to set it, cool enough that the outside does not harden before the middle rises. Expect 55 to 75 minutes in a tube pan; test with a skewer in the thickest part.
- MarblingAlternate spoonfuls as directed but resist swirling with a knife. The two batters are close in density and over-manipulation blends them into a uniform buff colour, which defeats the point.
- Peach flavouringNineteenth-century peach extract was drawn from peach kernels and tastes of bitter almond. Ordinary almond extract gives the same result; it is the flavour the recipe is after.
Gold-and-silver cakes were a standing feature of American cake chapters from the 1870s on, a tidy way to use eight yolks and eight whites without waste. The name here is political: "hard money" meant coin our gold and silver specie our as against the paper greenbacks issued during the Civil War, and the currency fight ran hot through the 1870s and 1880s, the decades in which The Dixie Cook Book was compiled. It is tempting to suppose, though the record does not show it, that a cook simply renamed the familiar gold-and-silver cake after the argument of the day; other cakes of the period were certainly christened for candidates and campaigns. The signed attribution to Miss Emma Fisher is typical of these subscription cookbooks, which were assembled from contributions by local women and printed their names beside the recipes.