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Metropolitan Cake
Two cups sugar, one of butter, one of milk, nearly four cups flour, whites of eight eggs, three tea-spoons baking-powder, flavor with lemon. Take a little more than three-fifths of this mixture in three jelly-tins, add to the remaining batter one table-spoon ground allspice, one and a half table-spoons cinnamon, tea-spoon cloves, fourth pound each of sliced citron and chopped raisins; bake in two jelly-tins and put together with frosting, alternating dark and light. - Mrs. Dr. D. H. Moore, Wesleyan College, Cincinnati.
A five-layer white cake in which two of the layers are turned into a dark fruited spice cake from the same batter. The recipe assumes you know how to cream butter and sugar and fold in beaten whites; what it does not tell you is pan size, oven heat, or baking time.
- Divide the batter by weight"A little more than three-fifths" is easier to manage on a scale: weigh the finished batter, take about 62 percent for the three pale layers and leave the rest for the dark. Guessing by eye leaves you with a thin layer somewhere in the stack.
- Jelly-tinsShallow round layer pans, 8 to 9 inches across and about an inch deep. Grease and line them; five thin layers bake faster and more evenly than two thick ones.
- OvenNo temperature or time is given; the heat is left to the cook's judgment. Bake at 350F for 15 to 20 minutes for the plain layers, a few minutes longer for the fruited ones, which are heavier and darker and catch on the bottom more readily.
- Egg whitesEight modern egg whites come to roughly one cup; period eggs ran smaller, so expect a little less. Beat them to soft, not stiff, peaks and fold them in last; the baking powder is doing much of the lifting.
- Baking powderThree teaspoons for nearly four cups of flour is at or slightly below modern practice, and nineteenth-century powders were generally weaker and less consistent than today's. If you taste a chemical aftertaste, two and a half teaspoons of a current double-acting powder will still raise the cake.
- CitronCandied citron peel, sold in tubs at Christmas and increasingly hard to find. Candied orange or lemon peel substitutes cleanly at the same quarter pound. Toss the fruit in a spoonful of the measured flour so it does not sink.
- Spice quantitiesA tablespoon of allspice plus a tablespoon and a half of cinnamon is assertive by current standards and was meant to be, since it has to read as a different cake from the white layers. Cutting each by a third still gives a clearly dark, spiced layer.
- Frosting and assemblyA plain boiled white icing or a confectioners' sugar frosting suits the cake, spread between layers and alternating light, dark, light, dark, light. It will serve roughly 12 to 16.
Layer cakes with grand names were a set piece of American community cookbooks in the 1870s and 1880s, when reliable chemical baking powder and cheap tinware made shallow round pans a standard part of a kitchen. The trick of the cake is thrift and display at once, since one batter is split, the smaller portion darkened with spice and fruit, and the alternating stripes of the cut slice do the decorative work. The Dixie Cook Book belongs to the same publishing family as the Ohio-compiled Buckeye Cookery, which may help explain why its contributors are so often Northern and Midwestern women identified by their husbands' titles and institutions. Mrs. Dr. D. H. Moore was attached to a Methodist women's college in Cincinnati, and the credit line is doing what such lines often did in these books: vouching for the recipe by vouching for the household it came from.