Silver Cake

Homemade silver cake with white frosting sliced on decorative plate with fork

I’ve never really been a “cake person.” For baking and eating, my memories tend to reside in the pie zone.

Then last year, when I graduated from reading the published canon of Maryland cookbooks on to the special collections at Maryland Historical Society, I began to notice a high ratio of cake recipes in personal cookery books. As I spent hour after hour poring over these old manuscripts (sometimes procrastinating on a lunch break – that didn’t help), I eventually started to feel like I was as intrigued by all of these cakes as the women who’d collected them.

But that’s not entirely possible, for reasons I will explain.

Good Housekeeping magazine cover from May 10, 1890 featuring hawthorn blossoms and vintage recipe content

Good Housekeeping, 1890. Contains many variations on Silver Cake aka “Foundation Cake”

First I must mention what you will find in the average 150-year-old personal cookbook.

These books are often a combination of hand-written recipes and newspaper or magazine clippings. Some are fairly small and others contain such an overwhelming chaos of recipe scraps that you can easily imagine the compiler making a weekly hobby of collecting recipes from the newspaper ladies page or her subscription to “Good Housekeeping.”

These aren’t treasured family recipes any more than your average pinterest board.

I began to see a correlation between these recipes and the facebook videos shared by family and friends. (Hey cousins-o-mine – did you ever *really* get around to making those cheddar-ritz cracker-buffalo-chicken bites?) Watching these videos lets us live the sensation and imagine the tastes of familiar ingredients combining into something new. With that in mind, it’s easy to see how the infinite combinations of flour, sugar, eggs, and butter offered a middle-class 19th-century woman an opportunity to escape into a fantasy (and occasionally to live the reality) of impressing friends, baking a treat for her family, and of course – personal enjoyment.

Housekeeper's Magazine and Family Economist title page listing important papers on markets, cooking, household management and agriculture topics

This 1826 magazine contained cooking receipts as well as information on gardening, drunkenness, and public abuses. That’s news you can use!

In “Cake: A Slice of History,” author Alysa Levine traces the history of cakes up from breads and dense fruit cakes on to the cultural changes that made lighter, sweeter cakes so appealing to 19th-century home cooks. “American bakers,” she writes, “did not remain wedded to their British heritage of rich fruit cakes for long. They soon lost most of their fruit and brown sugar, in favor of the rich whiteness of pound or Savoy cake… Appearances started to matter, and especially cakes which made an impression on the buffet table.”

The most important factor would be the decreasing cost of sugar. Sugar made its way into American diets through the 18th-century and left people craving more and more. Technological advances like better ovens and baking powder helped make cakes a realistic and attractive vehicle for a dose of sugar served at a special gathering or an afternoon ladies luncheon. With the amount of sugar at our disposal today, we can experience only a fraction of the excitement that the original compilers of the recipe books found in MDHS might have experienced when they clipped or copied these recipes.

Trade cookbooks from the baking powder and appliance companies, in addition to newspapers and magazines, helped to spread cake recipes nationally. “Even the ascetic Catherine Beecher included recipes for the popular pair of silver and gold cakes (one made with egg whites and one with yolks), often cut to show their insides and presented alternately down the table,” writes Levene.

After coming across similar recipes a dozen times in old manuscripts, I opted to make the famous Silver Cake, which, having been popularized just before the widespread availability of vanilla, was frequently sweetened with almonds and sometimes rose-water.

Vintage Lyons Hall & Co linoleum advertisement from 1884 Favorite Receipt Book promoting carpet matting and flooring

Advertisement, “The Favorite Receipt Book and Business Directory”

The recipe that I used comes from “The Favorite Receipt Book and Business Directory,” an advertisement-packed little book compiled in 1884 by the Ladies Aid Society of the Church of the Holy Comforter in Baltimore. The book offers up pages of bossy advice on housekeeping and social observances plus recipes, including over fifty for cakes. I chose a silver cake recipe calling for ‘sour cream’ even though this ingredient in 1884 would be meant more literally. I used modern “sour cream” which had been watered down with some milk.

According to the Oxford Encyclopedia of Food and Drink In America, the popularity of Silver and Gold cakes were “rapidly dwindling” by the end of the Civil War, to be reformulated and replaced by white and yellow cake. For me at least, working backward has changed my views on cake somewhat. Using modern knowledge about the cake order of operations (creaming butter and sugar, eggs one at a time, alternating dry & wet ingredients), these old recipes have a great texture and please the sweet tooth – all in all, they are well worth the fantasy.