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Kelly Island Cake
One cup butter, two of sugar, three of flour, four eggs, half cup milk, three tea-spoons baking-powder; bake in jelly-tins. For filling, stir together a grated lemon, a large grated tart apple, an egg, and a cup sugar, and boil four minutes. A very excellent cake.-Miss Greeley Grubbs.
A pound-cake-proportioned butter cake baked in thin layers, filled with what amounts to a lemon-apple curd cooked on the stovetop. The filling is the part that needs attention.
- The hinge: cook the filling gently and stirA whole egg stirred into grated fruit and sugar will scramble if it hits a hard boil untended. Keep it over moderate heat, stirring constantly for the four minutes, until it thickens to a spreadable curd, then cool completely before filling the cake.
- "A grated lemon"In period receipts this usually means the whole lemon taken down on a grater — rind, flesh and juice — rather than the zest alone. Remove seeds and the tough stem end, or the filling turns bitter. A microplane for the zest plus the chopped, seeded flesh gives much the same result with less work.
- Jelly-tinsShallow round layer pans, 8 or 9 inches across. This batter makes three or four thin layers; grease and line the bottoms, and divide by weight if you want them even.
- OvenThe book assumes you know your own oven. Bake at 350F for 18 to 22 minutes for thin layers — they are done when the centers spring back and the edges just pull from the pan.
- MeasurementsCup measures in 1883 were not standardized, but the proportions are the familiar 1-2-3-4 cake: 1 cup butter (8 oz), 2 cups sugar, 3 cups flour, 4 eggs. Use all-purpose flour and a light hand in mixing.
- Baking powderThree teaspoons to three cups of flour is about a teaspoon per cup, close to modern practice, though nineteenth-century powders were single-acting. Two teaspoons of modern double-acting powder will lift this batter and avoids any faint metallic edge.
- Method the original omitsCream butter and sugar, beat in eggs one at a time, then add flour sifted with the baking powder alternately with the milk. The half cup of milk is the whole liquid, so do not thin the batter further.
- Yield and keepingOne 8- or 9-inch layer cake, 10 to 12 slices. The fruit filling holds well for a day or two but softens the layers; assemble the day it is served and refrigerate any leftovers.
The Dixie Cook Book (1883) belongs to the family of American community cookbooks descended from Buckeye Cookery, in which many receipts carry a contributor's name — here Miss Greeley Grubbs — and the endorsement is as much social as culinary. The name likely points to Kelleys Island in Lake Erie off the Ohio shore, a limestone island known in the period for its quarries and vineyards, though the connection between the place and this particular filling is not documented and is best treated as fashion rather than provenance. What the recipe really shows is how a layer cake worked before commercial fillings: a lemon and a tart apple, grated fine and thickened with egg and sugar over the fire, gave a bright, translucent spread from two things any winter pantry had on hand.