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White Mountain Cake (Two and one-half coffee)
Two and one-half coffee cupfuls of sugar, one coffee cupful of butter, three coffee cupfuls of flour, one coffee cupful of milk, six eggs, two teaspoonfuls of cream tartar, one teaspoonful soda. Flavor with extract of lemon.
A plain butter cake given, as was usual in 1900, as a list of proportions with no method, pan or oven noted. Everything the original leaves out is below.
- The coffee cupfulA coffee cup of the period held roughly a standard 8 oz cup, sometimes a little less. Treat it as 1 cup throughout and the proportions work: 2 1/2 cups sugar, 1 cup (8 oz / 2 sticks) butter, 3 cups flour, 1 cup milk.
- Cream of tartar and soda are the baking powderTwo teaspoons cream of tartar to one of soda is the classic 2:1 homemade baking powder, equivalent to about 4 teaspoons of modern double-acting powder. Sift the soda and cream of tartar with the flour and get the batter into the oven promptly, since this leavening acts as soon as it meets the milk.
- Assembly the book assumesCream butter and sugar, beat in the eggs, then add flour and milk alternately, beginning and ending with flour. Six eggs into three cups of flour makes a heavy batter that needs real creaming, several minutes with a mixer.
- Oven and pansThe book names neither. A moderate oven, around 350F, suits this batter. It will fill two 9-inch round pans (35-40 minutes) or three 8-inch layers (25-30 minutes); a tube pan will take about an hour. Test with a skewer.
- FlourHousehold flour of the period was often softer than modern all-purpose, though this varied by region and mill. Cake flour, or all-purpose with two tablespoons per cup replaced by cornstarch, gives a closer crumb.
- Flavoring"Flavor with extract of lemon" gives no quantity; a teaspoon to a teaspoon and a half is a reasonable modern reading. A teaspoon of extract plus the grated zest of a lemon suits the cake.
- The frostingWhite Mountain cake is defined by its icing, which this entry omits entirely. It calls for boiled white frosting: a sugar syrup at the soft-ball stage, 238-240F, beaten into stiff egg whites. The hot syrup warms but does not reliably cook the whites, so use pasteurized whites if raw egg is a concern.
- YieldA large cake, 12 to 16 servings. It keeps two or three days under a cover; the boiled frosting seals the crumb.
White Mountain cake takes its name from its snowy boiled frosting rather than from any particular recipe for the cake beneath, which in American cookbooks of the 1870s onward is almost always a plain butter or cup cake in layers. The frosting was widely known as White Mountain cream or White Mountain frosting, generally traced to the New England habit of naming pale confections after the New Hampshire peaks. A related boiled icing, seven-minute frosting, later became the more familiar form. That this entry gives only the batter and trusts the cook to know the icing suggests how such books worked: they served as aides-memoire for cooks who had already learned to bake rather than as step-by-step instruction. The coffee cup as a unit belongs to the same world, a measure taken from the shelf rather than a graduated cup, and it was giving way by 1900 as standardized measuring cups spread through the domestic-science movement.