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Ice-Cream Cake (One-fourth pound each butter)
One-fourth pound each butter and powdered sugar, half pint milk, half pound flour, six eggs, one glass wine, one nutmeg; bake quickly in iron gem-pans. They raise light with hollow center. When cold, cut a round hole in top (as you would "plug" a melon), fill with ice-cream just before serving, so that it will not have time to melt.-Mrs. A. C. Glazier
A batter cake baked in gem pans, hollowed and filled with ice cream at the table — an early relative of the filled cupcake. The technique hinges entirely on eggs and heat, since there is no chemical leavening in the list.
- The hinge: beat the eggs hardWith no soda, baking powder or yeast, the hollow-centered rise comes from air beaten into six eggs and steam from a hot oven. Beat whites and yolks separately, whip the whites to firm peaks, and fold them in last so the batter goes into the pans still airy.
- "Bake quickly"Means a hot oven; a modern equivalent is somewhere around 400-425F. The quick heat helps set the outer shell before the center fills in, which is likely what gives the hollow.
- Iron gem-pansCast-iron gem pans are the ancestor of the muffin tin; a standard 12-cup muffin pan works. Period cookbooks often direct that gem pans be heated and greased before the batter goes in, so the batter starts cooking on contact.
- Weights and measuresOne-fourth pound butter is 1/2 cup (1 stick); one-fourth pound of finely ground sugar is roughly 2/3 cup; half a pound flour is about 1 3/4 cups. Half a pint milk is 1 cup.
- "Powdered sugar"In 1880s American books this usually meant granulated sugar ground fine, not modern confectioners' sugar with its cornstarch. Superfine or caster sugar is the closer match and creams better with the butter.
- "One glass wine"Genuinely imprecise. A wine glass of the period was usually reckoned at about 2 fluid ounces, so roughly 1/4 cup. Start at 1/4 cup of sherry or madeira -- more thins the batter and works against the rise.
- One nutmegA whole grated nutmeg is 2 to 3 teaspoons and will dominate everything, ice cream included. A teaspoon is closer to modern taste.
- Yield and servingAbout a dozen cakes. They must be completely cold before hollowing, and filled only as the plates go out; the original's warning about melting is the whole point of the dish. A small paring knife or apple corer takes the plug cleanly.
Ice-cream cake in this sense is not a layered frozen dessert but a hot-oven cake serving as an edible cup — a form that flourished in the decades after hand-crank freezers made ice cream a practical home dish rather than a confectioner's luxury. Mrs. A. C. Glazier's instruction to "plug" the cake as you would a melon borrows a familiar Southern gesture, since plugging a watermelon to test its ripeness was common enough to need no explanation. The gem pan she calls for was a fixture of the late-nineteenth-century kitchen, a heavy cast-iron tray of deep cups.