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Water-Melon Cake
White Part.-Two cups white sugar, one of butter, one of sweet milk, three and a half of flour, whites of eight eggs, two tea-spoons cream tartar, one of soda dissolved in a little warm water. Red Part. One cup red sugar, half cup butter, third cup sweet milk, two cups flour, whites of four eggs, tea-spoon cream tartar, half tea-spoon soda, tea-cup raisins; be careful to keep the red part around the tube of the pan and the white around the edge. It requires two persons to fill the pan. This is a very attractive and ornamental cake. - Mrs. B. F., Tuscumbia, Ala.
A two-batter novelty cake baked in a tube pan: a pale butter cake around the outside, a pink raisin-studded batter in the middle to suggest the flesh and seeds of a melon. The instructions assume you already know how to bake a cake, so the useful information is in the proportions, the colouring and the assembly.
- The hinge: keep the two batters separateBoth batters go into the pan raw, at the same time, and neither is stiff. Spoon the white around the outer wall and the red in a ring against the central tube, working in stages and pressing each addition gently against the metal rather than dropping it in from a height. The recipe is right that a second pair of hands makes this far easier.
- "Red sugar"Sugar tinted with colouring; cochineal was the usual red of the period. Modern equivalent: beat a little gel or paste colouring into the butter and sugar for the red portion. Liquid supermarket colouring will not give a melon-flesh pink without thinning the batter.
- Cream of tartar and sodaThis is homemade baking powder. Two teaspoons cream of tartar with one of soda is roughly equivalent to about four teaspoons of modern double-acting baking powder for the white part, and about two teaspoons for the red. Keep the original pairing if you want the slightly tangy, close crumb the recipe intends.
- Twelve egg whitesEight for the white batter, four for the red, all beaten stiff and folded in last for lift and pale colour. That leaves a dozen yolks; plan a custard or curd for the same day.
- Pan and quantityThis is a large cake. The two batters together come to five and a half cups of flour, which needs a large tube pan of at least 12-cup capacity, well greased and floured. Divided between two smaller pans the ring effect is lost.
- OvenThe book gives none. Bake at 325-350F; a cake this deep needs a moderate oven and time rather than heat, roughly 1 to 1 1/4 hours, until a skewer in the white part comes out clean.
- The raisinsThey stand in for melon seeds, so use dark raisins for contrast and toss them in a spoonful of the measured flour before folding them in, or they will sink out of the red ring during the long bake.
- YieldSixteen to twenty slices. Cut in wedges from the ring so each piece shows white rind and pink centre, which is the entire point of the cake.
Novelty "surprise" cakes were a fashion of the 1870s and 1880s, often associated with two ordinary developments: reliable chemical leavening, which let a cook bake a pale, fine-grained batter without eggs alone doing the work, and cheap tin tube pans, which gave a shape with a centre to hide something in. Watermelon cake turns up in American community and household cookbooks of the period in near-identical form, commonly with raisins for the seeds, and the joke depends entirely on the slice, not the flavour. Its appearance in The Dixie Cook Book, credited to a contributor in Tuscumbia, Alabama, is typical of how such recipes travelled: gathered by subscription from readers, printed with initials and a town, and passed along because a hostess wanted something that would draw comment at the table. The recipe frequently notes that it takes two people to fill the pan.