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Lady Baltimore Cake
1 cupful sugar 3/4 cupful Crisco ½ cupful cold water (White Cake) 1 teaspoonful vanilla extract 1 cupful sugar ½ cupful boiling water 2 whites of eggs 2½ cupfuls flour 2½ teaspoonfuls baking powder ½ teaspoonful salt 6 whites of eggs
What survives here is an ingredient list, not a method, and the two columns of the original page have collapsed into one another — you are looking at a white cake and its boiled frosting run together. Read it as two lists before you read it as one.
- Separate the two recipes firstThe cake is the sugar, Crisco, water, vanilla, flour, baking powder, salt and the six egg whites. The second sugar, the half cupful of boiling water and the two egg whites are the boiled icing that makes it a Lady Baltimore. Trying to combine all of it produces nothing.
- Quantities checkedThe water and salt quantities were checked against the printed page: the cake calls for half a cupful of cold water and half a teaspoonful of salt. Both figures are sound for a white cake of this size.
- The missing fillingA Lady Baltimore is defined by chopped raisins or figs, and nuts, folded into part of the boiled frosting. No fruit or nut appears in this list, so the page as transmitted cannot produce the cake it names.
- Crisco for butterThe list uses three-quarters of a cupful of shortening where a butter cake of the period would have used butter; the book's purpose was to show Crisco standing in for butter, which carries water and salt where shortening does not. Modern all-vegetable shortening behaves much the same way; it gives a whiter, softer crumb and less flavor than butter.
- Egg whitesSix whites is roughly 3/4 cup. They are beaten stiff and folded in last, which is the hinge of any white cake — the baking powder alone will not carry that much flour.
- OvenThe list gives no oven directions. A layer cake of this kind bakes at about 350F for 25 to 30 minutes in two or three greased 8- or 9-inch pans; a loaf of the same batter runs closer to 50 minutes at 325F.
- Boiled frostingOne cup sugar to half a cup water is cooked to the soft-ball stage, about 238F, then poured in a thin stream into two stiffly beaten whites and beaten until it holds. Syrup poured in too fast or too cool will not set.
- YieldEnough for a two- or three-layer cake serving twelve.
Lady Baltimore cake has little documented connection to Baltimore, and the origin of the name is not established. It is generally traced to Charleston, South Carolina, and became widely known after Owen Wister used it in his 1906 novel Lady Baltimore, in which the cake is sold at a Charleston tearoom; Wister is said to have been given it by Alicia Rhett Mayberry, and that attribution is traditional rather than proven. Within a decade the cake was a fixture of American cookbooks, which is why it turns up in The Story of Crisco — Procter & Gamble's promotional volume of 1913, credited to Marion Harris Neil, which existed to show that the new hydrogenated shortening could stand in for butter and lard in exactly the dishes a housekeeper already made. A tall white layer cake was a useful demonstration: shortening gives a paler crumb than butter, and pallor was the whole point of a white cake.