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Tennessee Cake
One pint sifted meal, half a pint flour, eight eggs, half a pound each butter and sugar; nutmeg and cinnamon to taste. Beat butter and sugar together, add eggs, then meal and flour gradually. Beat all well, and bake an hour and a half. To be eaten soon after baking.--"Aunt Katie," McMinnville.
A pound-cake formula with cornmeal standing in for much of the flour, and no chemical leavening at all. Everything depends on the eggs.
- The hinge: air from the eggsThere is no baking powder or soda here, so the only lift comes from the eggs and the creamed butter. Separating the eight eggs — yolks beaten into the creamed butter and sugar, whites whipped to soft peaks and folded in last, alternating with the dry ingredients — will give a lighter crumb, though it departs from the original, which says only to add the eggs. Beaten in whole, as the terse original implies, the cake will be denser.
- Meal"Meal" in a Southern book of this date is cornmeal, and a fine white or yellow meal is right — not polenta grind, and not self-rising. One pint sifted is about 2 cups, roughly 9-10 oz.
- The other measuresHalf a pint of flour is 1 cup. Half a pound of butter is 2 sticks (225 g); half a pound of sugar is a scant 1 1/4 cups. Cream them thoroughly, five minutes or more, since that aeration is doing structural work.
- Oven temperatureThe book assumes a wood range and gives none. An hour and a half at 325F suits this batter; a rich egg-and-butter cake baked hotter will color and set at the edge long before the center is done. A skewer should come out clean and the cake should smell nutty rather than raw.
- PanThat quantity of batter needs depth — a 10-inch tube pan or two loaf pans, well buttered and floured. A single shallow layer pan will overflow and the timing will be badly wrong.
- Spicing"To taste" leaves it open; about a teaspoon of grated nutmeg and a teaspoon of cinnamon is a reasonable starting point for a cake this size. Whole nutmeg grated fresh makes a noticeable difference in a plain cake with nowhere to hide.
- Eat it soon, and whyThe instruction is likely practical rather than sentimental. Cornmeal contributes no gluten, and a cornmeal crumb tends to stale quickly, going dry and sandy within a day or so. Serve it the day it is baked, warm, with butter or fruit.
- YieldAbout 12 generous slices from a tube pan.
The Dixie Cook Book, like most of the big subscription cookbooks of the 1880s, was assembled from contributions gathered town by town, and the signature "Aunt Katie, McMinnville" is typical of how those credits ran: a familiar name, a Tennessee town, no surname. The cake itself belongs to a wide Southern family of cornmeal pound cakes, in which meal replaces part or all of the wheat flour — a habit generally traced to periods and places where wheat was the expensive import and corn was what the mill down the road produced. Cornmeal gives a cake a slightly grainy, buttery crumb that plain flour does not.