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Orange Cake (Two cups sugar half cup butter)
Two cups sugar, half cup butter, three and a half cups sifted flour, half cup sweet milk, three eggs beaten separately, three teaspoons baking-powder mixed in flour; bake in jelly pans. For jelly take the juice and grated rind of two oranges, two table-spoons cold water, two cups sugar; set in a pot of boiling water, and, when scalding hot, stir in the yolks of two well-beaten eggs, and just before taking from the fire stir in the white of one egg slightly beaten, and when cold put between the layers of cake. Frost the top with the other egg.--Miss Mardie Dolbear, Cape Girardeau, Mo.
A three-layer butter cake with an orange curd filling, written in the compressed contributor style of the 1880s: ingredients listed, method assumed. The filling is the part that needs attention.
- The hinge: the filling must not boilThe orange "jelly" is a curd, cooked over water rather than direct heat for exactly that reason. Stir constantly and pull it off when it coats a spoon (around 170F); if it approaches a simmer the yolks scramble and no amount of beating will smooth them out.
- "Jelly pans"Shallow round layer tins, roughly 8 to 9 inches. The recipe does not say how many layers it makes; this quantity of batter will fill two or three. Grease the tins and line the bottoms.
- OvenNone is given because the cook was expected to judge her own range. Bake at 350F for 20 to 25 minutes, until the layers spring back and pull slightly from the sides.
- Sweet milkPlain fresh whole milk, named to distinguish it from sour milk or buttermilk, which would have called for saleratus instead of baking powder.
- Assumed methodCream the butter and sugar, beat in the yolks, add the flour and baking powder alternately with the milk, then fold in the stiffly beaten whites last. "Three eggs beaten separately" is the instruction for that sequence.
- "Set in a pot of boiling water"A double boiler, improvised or otherwise. The recipe does call for boiling water, but the yolks are safer the gentler you keep it: stir constantly and take the pan off the heat before the mixture approaches a simmer.
- The frosting egg"Frost the top with the other egg" means an uncooked white beaten with sugar to a spreadable icing. Raw white carries a salmonella risk, small but real; use pasteurized whites, or make a cooked meringue or a simple orange glaze of confectioners' sugar and juice instead.
- YieldOne three-layer cake, 10 to 12 servings. The curd makes more than enough for two layers of filling; leftovers keep a few days refrigerated.
The Dixie Cook-Book belongs to the great wave of 1880s American compilation cookbooks, assembled from contributions signed with a name and a town — here Miss Mardie Dolbear of Cape Girardeau, Missouri, on the Mississippi. Layer cakes with fruit fillings were popular in this period, and the chemical baking powder called for here made even, tender layers easier to produce. Fillings of this kind were commonly called "jelly" in nineteenth-century cake recipes; this one is what a modern kitchen would call orange curd, thickened with yolk rather than pectin. The final line — frost the top with the leftover white — is characteristic of the genre's thrift, the recipe using up the white left over from the two eggs of the filling.