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Martha Washington Pie
If Bake plain mixture in 2 layers. Cool; fill between layers and spread on top whipped cream, sweetened and flavored with vanilla.
This is an assembly note rather than a full recipe: it depends on the "plain mixture" — the book's basic butter-cake batter — given elsewhere in the cake section. Everything here rests on the whipped cream, which is both filling and frosting.
- "Plain mixture"The phrase points back to a master recipe for a plain butter cake given elsewhere in the cake section; its proportions are not restated here. Any plain one-bowl yellow layer cake stands in without harm.
- Pans and ovenThe entry gives no pan size, oven heat or baking time; all of that belongs to the master mixture. As modern guidance, two 8- or 9-inch round layers, greased and floured, at 350F for 25 to 30 minutes.
- Cool means coldThe layers must be at room temperature or below before the cream goes on. Whipped cream collapses and weeps against a barely warm crumb, and this cake has no buttercream to hold it together.
- The creamUse heavy or whipping cream at 36 percent fat or higher; ultra-pasteurized whips but holds less well. Chill the bowl, beater and cream, and stop at soft-to-medium peaks — beaten stiff, it is difficult to spread without tearing the cake.
- SweeteningAbout 2 tablespoons confectioners' sugar and 1/2 teaspoon vanilla per cup of cream. Confectioners' sugar contains cornstarch and gives a slightly more stable cream than granulated.
- StorageThis is a refrigerator cake and a same-day cake. Keep it cold until serving and expect the filling to begin seeping into the crumb after a few hours.
- YieldTwo layers of this size serve 8 to 10. Figure about 2 cups cream, whipped, to fill and top; the sides are left bare in the original.
The Metropolitan Cook Book was published by the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company and handed out free by its agents for decades in the first half of the twentieth century — a domestic-science pamphlet as advertising, full of short recipes written on the assumption that the reader would consult a basic mixture and vary it. That is exactly the shape of this entry. The name is a small puzzle in itself: Martha Washington pie, like Washington pie and Boston cream pie, is a layer cake, not a pie, a New England habit of naming that is generally traced to the practice of baking thin cake layers in pie tins. Older Washington pies were filled with jelly or jam; the whipped-cream version here reflects a later, dairy-forward American preference. The Washington attribution is decorative rather than documented — such names were widely applied to plain filled cakes through the nineteenth century, with no established link to Martha Washington's own kitchen.