CAKE
BAKING IN THE OLD WEST
Our
grandmothers and great grandmothers couldn’t simply rip the top off a box of
Duncan-Hines Devil’s Food Cake Mix. Baking at the turn of the 19th
century was a far sight different than it is today. Many baked on coal- or
wood-burning stoves… without temperature dials and judged an oven’s heat by
sticking a bare hand in and counting how many seconds they could stand it.
In
a day and age when cake recipes often relied solely on eggs to make the batter
rise, they whipped egg whites separately from the yolks and carefully folded
both highly-beaten components into the batter. When hand-cranked rotary
egg beaters came on the market in the mid to late 19th
century, the exhausting and time-consuming chore became much easier.
Common Baking Ingredients of the
late 19th Century Old West:
1. Butter
2. Lard
3. Eggs
4. Milk (including sour milk)
5. Flour (wheat, rye, cornmeal, graham flour, etc.)
6. Sugar, pulverized sugar
7. Molasses
8. Salt
9. Vinegar
10. Baking Powder
11. Baking Soda
12. Cream of Tartar
13. Corn Starch
14. Chocolate
15. Citrus like lemon
16. Cinnamon, ginger, cloves, etc.
17. Nuts
Cream
Cake Recipe, 1890
From: Compendium of Cookery and Reliable
Recipes, 1890
Ingredients:
10
eggs, divided
1
½ cups pulverized sugar
1
goblet flour
1
heaping teaspoon cream of tartar
½
pint sweet cream
1
tablespoon powdered sugar
1
teaspoon cornstarch
A
little milk
½
lb. almonds
Directions:
1.
On beaten whites of 10 eggs, sift one and a half
cups pulverized sugar and a goblet of flour throughout which has been stirred
by a heaping teaspoon cream of tartar. Stir very gently. Do not heat it.
2.
Bake in jelly pans.
3.
For cream: take half pint of sweet cream, yolks of
3 eggs, a tablespoon of pulverized sugar, a teaspoon cornstarch, and dissolve
starch smoothly with a little milk. Beat yolks and sugar together with this.
4.
Boil the cream and stir these ingredients in as
for any cream cake filling, only make a little thicker.
5.
Blanch and chop fine a half pound almonds and stir
into the cream. Put together like jelly cake while icing is soft and thick. Stick
in a half pound of almonds. Split into two.
I’m
an experienced baker, and this recipe
confuses me. It’s perhaps more informative than useful for today’s bakers,
as it provided a valuable glimpse into history.
In
The
Drifter’s Proposal, Adaline Whipple runs her family’s bakery
business in the wake of her father’s untimely death. She learned every skill of
baking (bread, pies, yeast rolls, quick breads, tarts, doughnuts, cookies) from
her father. This part of the story came easily for me, as I’m a capable self-taught
home-baker.
The Drifter’s Proposal Book
Description:
The
baker’s man is home for Christmas…
Spinster
Adaline Whipple runs the family’s business, Whipple Bakery, since her father’s demise almost
four months ago. She’s stunned by a surprise mortgage her father made with a
bank in Denver City six months before he died. Now that the loan is sixty days
overdue, the big-town banker wants his money. Adaline’s sure the handsome
drifter Malloy’s proposal of… marriage?... won’t do her any good.
But his mere offer to help feeds the attraction she’s felt for him, and before
she knows it, she trusts the one man who can break her heart.
The Drifter’s Proposal is novella #5 of 10 contained within Silver Belles and Stetsons, a Western Romance Christmas Anthology.
About
Kristin Holt:
I recall the winter of my first grade year, basking in the heat from our fireplace in Kalamazoo, Michigan.
Dad read aloud Madeline L'Engle's A WRINKLE IN TIME and Mom peeled orange segments for us to enjoy. That was the definitive moment I fell in love with fiction.
I write sweet (wholesome) romances set in the 19th Century American West. I'm newly active in a fantastic Facebook group for authors and readers of Western Historical Romances: Join the fun at www.facebook.com/groups/pioneerhearts.
Please stop by at KristinHolt.com and say hello!
I recall the winter of my first grade year, basking in the heat from our fireplace in Kalamazoo, Michigan.
Dad read aloud Madeline L'Engle's A WRINKLE IN TIME and Mom peeled orange segments for us to enjoy. That was the definitive moment I fell in love with fiction.
I write sweet (wholesome) romances set in the 19th Century American West. I'm newly active in a fantastic Facebook group for authors and readers of Western Historical Romances: Join the fun at www.facebook.com/groups/pioneerhearts.
Please stop by at KristinHolt.com and say hello!
