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Minnehaha Cake
One and a half cups granulated sugar, half cup butter stirred to a cream, whites of six eggs, or three whole eggs, two tea-spoons cream tartar stirred in two heaping cups sifted flour, one tea-spoon soda in half cup sweet milk; bake in three layers. For filling, take a tea-cup sugar and a little water boiled together until it is brittle when dropped in cold water, remove from stove and stir quickly into the well-beaten white of an egg; add to this a cup of stoned raisins chopped fine, or a cup of chopped hickory-nut meats, and place between layers and over the top. A universal favorite.- Mrs. E. W. Herrick,
A white layer cake with a boiled meringue filling, from the era when cooks built their own leavening from soda and cream of tartar. The syrup stage is the part that decides whether it works.
- The hinge: syrup temperature"Brittle when dropped in cold water" is the hard-crack stage, 300-310F on a thermometer. Pulled too early the filling stays a sticky sauce that soaks the layers; taken much past 310F it turns to hard candy in the bowl.
- LeaveningTwo teaspoons cream of tartar plus one teaspoon soda is a homemade baking powder; by the usual equivalence (1/4 teaspoon soda plus 1/2 teaspoon cream of tartar per teaspoon of powder) that is on the order of 4 teaspoons of modern baking powder. If you substitute powder, leave out the cream of tartar and soda.
- Sweet milkSimply fresh unsoured milk, specified because many nineteenth-century recipes called for buttermilk or clabber. Whole milk is the closest match.
- A tea-cupNineteenth-century tea-cups generally ran a little under a standard measuring cup, so treat it as about 3/4 cup of sugar for the filling; the book itself does not define the measure. The syrup will be roughly enough for three layers plus the top, with little to spare for the sides.
- Oven and pansBake at 350F in three greased 8-inch pans, 18-25 minutes, until the centers spring back. The original assumes a wood range where the cook judged by hand and color.
- Whites versus whole eggsSix whites give the pale crumb the name implies; three whole eggs give a yellower, slightly richer cake. Do not use both figures at once.
- Hickory nutsHickory-nut meats were gathered rather than bought and are still hard to find shelled. Pecans are a common substitute and belong to the same genus, Carya.
- Raw white in the fillingThe hot syrup partly cooks the beaten white but does not reliably pasteurize it. If serving anyone frail, use pasteurized egg white.
- YieldOne three-layer 8-inch cake, twelve to sixteen slices. The filling firms as it cools, so spread it while still warm and workable.
The name comes from Longfellow's The Song of Hiawatha (1855), whose heroine Minnehaha is glossed in the poem as "laughing water" -- a name American cooks attached to any number of white cakes and foamy boiled frostings in the decades after the poem's enormous popularity. What defines the cake is not the batter, which is an ordinary white layer cake, but the filling: a boiled sugar syrup whipped into egg white, the same technique behind seven-minute frosting and Italian meringue. The attribution to Mrs. E. W. Herrick reflects how the book was assembled -- as a compilation of contributed household recipes, each vouched for by the woman who made it, here with the note that it was "a universal favorite."