Home › Layer-Cakes › Orange Cake (One cup butter one of water)
Orange Cake (One cup butter one of water)
One cup butter, one of water, two of sugar, four of flour, three eggs, three tea-spoons baking-powder; bake in layers. Take the juice of two large or three small oranges, coffee-cup pulverized sugar, one egg; mix yolk of egg, sugar, and juice together; beat whites to a stiff froth, stir in and spread between the layers. -Mrs. W. B. Brown, Washington D. C.
The layers are an ordinary butter cake of the 1880s and behave predictably; the orange filling is the problem, and it is not a small one.
- The filling is never cookedA whole raw egg is beaten with sugar and orange juice and spread between the layers, where it is eaten uncooked and then sits at room temperature. Nothing in the method brings it near the 160F needed to kill Salmonella, and the acidity of orange juice does not accomplish it either. If you want an orange filling for these layers, use a current recipe for a cooked orange curd or one built on pasteurized egg.
- Standing time makes it worseStanding time — The recipe gives no serving instruction, and a filled cake may well sit at room temperature before it is cut. Raw egg spread through a moist, sugary filling and held unrefrigerated is the condition food-safety guidance is written against.
- Coffee-cupNineteenth-century cup measures were not standardized. A coffee-cup is generally taken as somewhat larger than a teacup, roughly a full cup to a cup and a quarter, but the amount here is genuinely ambiguous and the original gives no weight.
- Pulverized sugarThis is finely ground sugar, closer to today's superfine or confectioners' sugar than to granulated. Older confectioners' sugar was not always cut with cornstarch, so a modern box will thicken a liquid mixture more than the original did.
- Water, not milkThe batter is liquefied with water rather than milk, which was not unusual in cake recipes of the period; it gives a plainer crumb than a milk cake. The recipe offers no explanation for the choice.
- Bake in layersThe original gives no oven instruction and no tin size. This quantity of batter would plausibly fill three to four 8- or 9-inch tins, and thin layers of this kind bake fairly quickly; anyone reproducing it will have to settle the oven and the timing themselves.
- Baking powder of the periodThree teaspoons to four cups of flour is modest leavening by modern standards. Period flours were generally softer and lower in protein than modern all-purpose, and baking powders of the 1880s were single-acting, so modern double-acting powder in the same proportion will not behave identically.
The Dixie Cook-Book, compiled by Estelle Woods Wilcox and issued in the 1880s from the same publishing operation that produced the Buckeye Cookery books, is a contributed collection: hundreds of short recipes signed with a name and a city, here a Mrs. W. B. Brown of Washington, D.C. Orange cakes appear widely in Southern and border-state books of the period. Uncooked juice-and-egg fillings, and uncooked frostings of beaten white and pulverized sugar, both turn up in books of this era; they largely drop out of later cookbooks.