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Washington Cream Cake
Mrs. Carson.
Two cups sugar, one-half cup sweet milk, four eggs, three cups flour, three even teaspoons Cook's Friend baking powder, butter the size of an egg.
CREAM FOR WASHINGTON CAKE-One pint of sweet milk, three eggs, one cup flour, one sugar, flavour with anything; after it is cooked add half cup butter, and place between the cakes as you would jelly.
A plain butter layer cake filled with a cooked pastry cream. The recipe assumes you know how to handle a custard on the stove, so the two places to pay attention are the thickness of the cream and the heat you cook it over.
- The hinge: cook the cream gentlyOne pint of milk with three eggs and flour is a pastry cream. Whisk it constantly over low heat or in a double boiler until it thickens and just bubbles, then take it off; a hard boil over direct heat will scramble the eggs and scorch the flour. Beat in the butter at the end, off the heat, and cool the cream completely before it goes between the layers or it will soak and slide.
- "One sugar"The cream's list drops the unit: read it as one cup of sugar, matching the one cup of flour beside it. Modern palates may find that sweet against a cake already carrying two cups of sugar, and two-thirds of a cup makes a better filling.
- A cup of flour is a lotOne cup of flour per pint of milk gives a filling stiff enough to slice. If you want something closer to a modern cream filling, a third to a half cup thickens the pint adequately.
- Butter the size of an eggAbout 2 ounces, or 4 tablespoons. Cream it with the sugar rather than melting it in.
- Sweet milkSimply fresh unsoured milk, specified because sour milk and buttermilk were the everyday alternatives in a kitchen that used soda. Whole milk throughout.
- Cook's Friend baking powderA baking-powder brand sold in Canada in this period, long associated with McLaren's of Montreal. Three level teaspoons of modern double-acting powder for three cups of flour is generous but workable; two and a half is safer against a coarse, dry crumb.
- Pans and ovenThe batter is thick, with only half a cup of milk. Divide it between two greased and floured 9-inch pans and bake at 350F for 25 to 30 minutes, or three 8-inch pans for 20 to 22 minutes, until a tester comes out clean.
- Flavouring"Flavour with anything" meant vanilla, lemon extract, rose water or a little nutmeg. A teaspoon of vanilla or the zest of a lemon stirred into the cooled cream is the usual reading.
- YieldOne two-layer cake, ten to twelve servings. Because the filling is a dairy custard, keep the assembled cake refrigerated and eat it within two days.
Washington cake and Washington cream cake appear all through nineteenth-century North American cookbooks, part of a large family of dishes given the first president's name for patriotic rather than biographical reasons; no connection to the man himself is documented. The cream cake is the direct relative of what is now called Boston cream pie: two thin butter layers with a pastry cream between them, baked in pie tins. Its arrival in a book like this one may owe something to chemical baking powder, which by the 1870s let a cook raise three cups of flour with three teaspoons of powder, though the batter also carries four eggs, and soda-and-cream-of-tartar leavening long predates commercial powders. The naming of a specific brand, Cook's Friend, is a small piece of evidence about who these contributors were and where they shopped, and it appears in The Home Cook Book, compiled from the receipts of Canadian housekeepers and sold for charity.