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White Mountain Cake
Two cups pulverized sugar, half cup butter beaten to a cream; add half cup sweet milk, two and a half cups flour, two and a half tea-spoons baking-powder in the flour, whites of eight eggs; bake in jelly-tins and put together with icing made by boiling a half teacup of water and three tea-cups sugar till thick; pour it slowly over the well-beaten whites of three eggs, and beat all together till cool. Beat before putting on each layer.
Sprinkle each layer thickly with grated cocoa-nut, and a hand some cocoa-nut cake will result. - Mrs. Dr. Stall, Union City, Ind.
A white butter cake built on eight egg whites, layered with boiled icing and coconut. The recipe assumes you know how to handle a sugar syrup, which is where the whole thing succeeds or fails.
- The hinge: the syrupBoiling water and sugar "till thick" points to the soft- to firm-ball range, somewhere around 238-248F on a thermometer. Under-cooked syrup gives a frosting that runs off the layers and never sets; cooked much further it tends to turn grainy and brittle as it cools.
- Pulverized sugarIn this period that means sugar ground finer than granulated but coarser than today's confectioners' sugar, which contains cornstarch. Superfine (caster) sugar is the closest match for the cake; ordinary granulated works for the boiled icing.
- Jelly-tinsShallow round layer pans, 8 or 9 inches. The recipe does not say how many; this quantity of batter will probably make about three thin layers. Grease and line the bottoms.
- OvenNot stated, as usual for a stove-era book. Bake at 350F for 20-25 minutes, until the layers spring back and just begin to pull from the sides. Whites-only cakes brown fast and dry out faster.
- Egg whitesEight whites is roughly one cup. Beat them to soft, not stiff, peaks and fold them in last; the recipe lists them at the end of the ingredients.
- Sweet milkPlain unsoured whole milk, specified because sour milk and buttermilk were also in common use and call for soda rather than baking powder.
- Beating the icing"Beat all together till cool" is literal, and takes 7-10 minutes with a stand mixer. The frosting must be spread while still soft; the instruction to beat again before each layer keeps it from stiffening in the bowl.
- Cocoa-nutFresh coconut, cracked and grated at home, which is unsweetened and moist. Unsweetened frozen or desiccated shredded coconut is the nearest thing; sweetened bagged flake makes an already very sweet cake sweeter still.
- YieldProbably three layers; slice count will vary. The iced cake keeps a day or two under a dome; boiled icing weeps in the refrigerator.
White Mountain cake is a familiar nineteenth-century American name for a white layer cake finished with boiled white icing, the name usually taken to allude to the snowy peaked frosting, though that reading is traditional rather than documented. It appears under that title in a number of community and commercial cookbooks of the period, sometimes plain, sometimes with coconut as here. Such cakes depended on chemical baking powder, which made a delicate whites-only batter dependable, and on cheap refined white sugar, which made a boiled meringue frosting worth the fuel. Coconut was the luxury note, shipped north and grated by hand at home. As often in The Dixie Cook-Book, the recipe carries a contributor's name and town, in this case Mrs. Dr. Stall of Union City, Indiana, a reminder that these compilations were assembled from correspondence.