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Toronto Pie
Mrs. D.
One cup of sugar, three eggs, one and one-half cups of flour, one teaspoonful of Cook's Friend baking powder flavour to taste; bake as for jelly cake in layers, and spread between the layers raspberry jam.
A jelly cake in all but name: three thin sponge layers with raspberry jam between. The original assumes you know how a jelly cake is handled, so most of the work here is filling in what Mrs. D. left unsaid.
- The hinge is the eggsThere is no butter, no milk and no water in this batter, so every bit of lift comes from air beaten into the eggs and sugar plus the baking powder. Beat whole eggs and sugar until pale, thick and tripled in volume, then fold the flour in by hand; stirring it in briskly will knock the batter flat and give you three leathery discs.
- Cook's Friend baking powderA Canadian brand widely sold in the late nineteenth century and still on shelves today. Any modern double-acting baking powder substitutes one for one, though a teaspoon is modest for a cup and a half of flour, which is further reason not to lose the beaten-egg volume.
- "Bake as for jelly cake in layers"Jelly cake tins were shallow round pans, roughly 8 to 9 inches. The recipe does not say how many layers; divide the batter between two or three tins so each is only shallow, and level it with the back of a spoon.
- OvenNo temperature is given because the cook was expected to judge her range. Bake at 350–375F. Thin layers of this kind are done in 10 to 15 minutes, when the top springs back and the edge just begins to shrink from the tin.
- "Flavour to taste"The flavourings usual in cookbooks of this period were lemon extract, vanilla, and sometimes rose or almond. A teaspoon of vanilla or the grated zest of a lemon is in keeping.
- Measuring the flourNineteenth-century cups were not standardised, and flour was scooped rather than weighed. For a batter this lean, treat a cup and a half as about 190 g and spoon it into the cup rather than packing it.
- The jamWarm the raspberry jam slightly and beat it smooth before spreading, and let the layers cool completely first. Jam on a warm sponge soaks in and the cake will not hold its layers.
- YieldThree thin layers make a cake serving eight to ten. It is best eaten the day it is made; without fat in the crumb it stales quickly.
The Home Cook Book was compiled in Toronto in 1877 by "ladies of Toronto and chief cities and towns in Canada" and sold in aid of the Hospital for Sick Children, which makes it one of the earliest Canadian charity cookbooks of the kind that flooded North America in the 1870s and 1880s. Recipes signed with an initial, like Mrs. D. here, are typical of the book, and the brand name in the ingredient list is a reminder that commercial chemical leavening was still new enough to be worth specifying by maker. The dish is not a pie in any modern sense: through the nineteenth century "pie" was used loosely in North America for shallow filled layer cakes baked in pie or jelly tins, the same usage that gives us Boston cream pie. Why this particular jam sponge took the city's name is not documented, but naming a plain layer cake after a place was ordinary practice in books of this era, where Washington pie and its like describe much the same thing.