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Orange Cake as Jelly Cake
Mrs. H. Baird.
Cake part.-Five eggs, two cups of sugar, two cups of flour, half a cup of cold water, one teaspoon of cream of tartar, half a teaspoon of soda. Dressing. - Use the grated rind of one large orange, and the juice; stiffen with the white of one egg and sugar.
A butterless sponge-type layer cake from a Toronto community cookbook, assembled "as jelly cake" — thin layers with filling between. The cake itself is straightforward; the dressing is where it fails a modern kitchen.
- The dressing is raw egg white, never cookedThe filling and topping are nothing but grated orange rind, juice, sugar and one uncooked egg white, spread on cooled cake and eaten as is. Nothing in the process brings the white to a temperature that would kill Salmonella, and the acid from the orange does not sterilise it. A current cooked-frosting or Swiss-meringue recipe should be used instead.
- "Jelly cake" means the shape, not the fillingIn nineteenth-century usage a jelly cake is a cake baked in several shallow tins and stacked with a spreadable filling between the layers — jelly, jam, lemon or, as here, orange. It does not mean gelatin is involved.
- Cream of tartar and sodaOne teaspoon cream of tartar with half a teaspoon soda is the pre-baking-powder leavening pair; the acid salt reacts with the soda as soon as liquid is added. Batters raised this way were mixed quickly and put straight into the oven, since the lift is largely spent within minutes.
- No fat in the batterThere is no butter or shortening at all; the structure comes from five eggs beaten with the sugar, helped by the cream of tartar and soda. Beating matters a great deal here, and a fatless cake of this kind stales quickly, so it is best eaten the day it is made.
- OvenThe original gives none, and no tin size or baking time either. A moderate oven, in modern terms somewhere around 350F, and shallow round tins baked until the surface springs back is a reasonable modern starting point rather than anything the recipe specifies.
- CupsNineteenth-century domestic cups were not standardised, though many run near the modern 8 fl oz cup, and flour was generally scooped rather than spooned and levelled, so two cups here may well be more than 8 oz. Weighing the flour, in the region of 255-285 g, gives a more predictable crumb.
- YieldThe recipe gives no tin size or number of layers; five eggs with two cups each of sugar and flour is enough batter for several thin layers.
The Home Cook Book (Toronto, 1877) was compiled "by ladies of Toronto and chief cities and towns in Canada" and sold in aid of the Hospital for Sick Children — one of the earliest and most successful Canadian charity cookbooks, and the reason so many of its recipes carry a contributor's name like Mrs. H. Baird. Orange fillings appear repeatedly in such books, when citrus was still enough of a novelty to make a cake worth naming. The uncooked white-of-egg-and-sugar dressing was one of the household icings of the period, though cooked and boiled icings were already common in nineteenth-century books as well.