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White Mountain Jelly Cake
Mrs. Carson.
One cup of butter, two cups of sugar, three and a-half cups of flour, one cup of milk, two eggs, two teaspoons cream of tartar, one teaspoon soda; stir all together without separating eggs; put soda in milk, and stir the cream of tartar in flour; bake the same as jelly cake, and use frosting between made of whites of three eggs and fine white sugar.
A big, plain butter cake baked in thin layers and stacked with white icing. Two things need translating: "bake the same as jelly cake," which assumed the reader already owned shallow tins, and the cream of tartar plus soda, which is baking powder made from scratch at the table.
- The leaveningTwo teaspoons cream of tartar with one teaspoon soda is a home-mixed baking powder, and the recipe is right that they must be kept apart until the batter comes together — soda into the milk, cream of tartar sifted through the flour. If you substitute commercial baking powder, use about 4 teaspoons and omit both.
- Cup of butterA cup of butter is 8 oz / 225 g, two sticks. Have it soft enough to cream but not oily; with only two eggs in three and a half cups of flour, the aeration from creaming the butter and sugar is doing real work.
- "Stir all together without separating eggs"The recipe mixes whole eggs straight into the batter rather than beating the whites separately and folding them in, as a number of contemporary cake receipts direct; the batter can therefore be mixed straight through.
- "Bake the same as jelly cake"That means thin layers in shallow round tins rather than one deep cake; the recipe names no pan size, temperature or time, assuming the reader knew. As a modern starting point, this quantity will fill three or four 9-inch tins, and at 350F they take roughly 15 to 20 minutes; they are done when the centre springs back and the edges just pull from the tin. Thin layers overbake quickly, so check early.
- The frostingThree whites beaten stiff with fine white sugar; "fine" most likely means finely powdered rather than granulated sugar, for which modern confectioners' sugar is the nearest equivalent, about 2 1/2 to 3 cups, added gradually until it holds a spreadable shape. This is an uncooked icing; if you are serving anyone who should avoid raw egg, pasteurized whites behave the same way.
- AssemblyFrosting goes between the layers in place of the jelly the format is named for. Spread it while the layers are fully cool or it will slide, and let the finished cake stand an hour so the surface sets.
- YieldA three- or four-layer cake serving 10 to 12. The batter is large by modern standards and halves cleanly if you want two layers.
"White Mountain" was a stock nineteenth-century name for anything finished in snowy white icing, generally traced to the peaks of New Hampshire's White Mountains, then popular as a summer resort; the term attached to cakes, puddings and boiled frostings more or less interchangeably. "Jelly cake" here describes a method rather than a filling — thin layers baked in shallow tins and stacked. The Home Cook Book was assembled in Chicago in the 1870s from receipts contributed by named local women and sold for charity, which is why so many entries, this one included, carry a contributor's name and assume she is talking to neighbours who already know how jelly cake is baked.