Keith Stavely and Kathleen Fitzgerald

A "Great Cake" for the Holidays!

We are revisiting this cake recipe (posted previously during a presidential election year) to remind our readers that it would make a superb addition to any holiday table. It's a show-stopper of a cake, substantial, rich (though not overly sweet), and coated in an avalanche of white frosting. Such fancy cakes with white icing were served at formal dinners and elegant supper parties favored by nineteenth-century urban elites in America's bustling cities.

Election Cake is an adaptation of the English "Great Cake," traditionally made with flour, yeast, sugar, spices, butter, cream, wine, and raisins or currants. The "twelve or twenty loaves" made for election week festivities by Hartford women in the early 1800s were adapted from the huge single cakes made in England in earlier days. Anywhere from a peck (fourteen pounds) to half a bushel (twenty-eight pounds) of flour had been mixed into those. Great cakes indeed!

While the women of Hartford's mansion houses divided these massive productions into multiple loaves, the famed nineteenth-century abolitionist and writer (who also authored a cookbook), Lydia Maria Child, calls her recipe an "old fashioned" Election Cake. She reduces the flour to a "mere" four pounds, enough for a couple of loaves of cake. Even this amount would be considered a lot to bake at one time by most home bakers today. So we've reduced the quantities to make one beautiful cake. We think it's just the thing for a luscious-looking holiday table centerpiece.

The Ingredients—Cake
(makes 1 cake)

2 cups whole milk
1 cup + 2 tablespoons sugar
¼ teaspoon salt
3 packets active dry yeast
7¼ cups all-purpose flour
12 tablespoons butter
2 eggs
1¼ cups raisins

The Ingredients—Frosting
Child's recipe doesn't call for frosting, but we know that the Election Cakes of her day were often frosted. A Connecticut man, John Howard Renfield, lovingly recalled the "delicate frostings of white of egg and sugar" that coated the Election Cakes of his early-nineteenth-century childhood. The cake we were making was going to be displayed as well as eaten, and we thought frosting would make it look, as well as taste, even better.

1 cup sugar
1⅓ cup water
¼ teaspoon cream of tartar (or ½ teaspoon light corn syrup)
dash of salt
2 egg whites
1 teaspoon vanilla

How We Made It

We scalded the milk, poured it into a mixing bowl, and added to it the salt and ¼ cup of the sugar. After this mixture had cooled to lukewarm, we stirred in the yeast.

As soon as the yeast activated, we mixed in 6 cups of the flour, then kneaded this preliminary dough for 2 minutes in our stand mixer.

We creamed the remaining sugar with the butter, then added the eggs.

After mixing the raisins with the remaining flour, we resorted once again to our nifty stand mixer to merge the three components we now had—dough, sugar/butter/egg, and flour/raisins—into one.

We returned our fully-assembled Election Cake dough to the original mixing bowl and left it to rise for 2 – 2¼ hours, or until doubled in bulk.

We now preheated the oven to 375º F. We put the dough into a baking pan and let it rise for another 20 minutes.

It was ready for the oven, where it baked for 10 minutes at 375ºF, then for 80 minutes at 350ºF. When it was done to a lovely golden brown, we cooled it on a rack for 10 minutes, then removed it from the pan and cooled it completely, about 30 minutes longer.

While it was cooling we made the frosting.

First, we whisked the egg whites in our stand mixer (you can use a hand-held mixer just as well) until soft peaks formed.

Then we put the sugar, water, cream of tartar, and salt in a non-aluminum (non-reactive) saucepan and stirred until the sugar was melted. We allowed the syrup to boil for 2 minutes, until it reached 240°F on our candy thermometer. Be careful, this is a very hot liquid!

We then poured the hot syrup in a slow, steady stream while beating the egg whites on high speed. Again be very careful with the hot syrup! (This procedure brought the mixture to 160°F, the temperature at which any salmonella bacteria that may be present are killed. Do check your frosting with a candy thermometer to be sure. And if very young children, older, or immune-compromised people will be eating the frosting, it is even safer to use pasteurized, powdered egg whites rather than fresh egg whites.)

We added the vanilla and continued beating until soft peaks formed. As the cake was now sufficiently cooled, we applied to it a generous, swirly layer of our "delicate frosting of white of egg and sugar."

Lydia Maria Child's recipe, with icing inspired by John Howard Renfield's recollections, produces a glorious, old-fashioned cake that's perfect for a modern festive menu.

Child's original recipe, with commentary, can be found in our book, Northern Hospitality, p. 385.

NINETEENTH-CENTURY APPLE PIE

This lightly sweetened, subtly spiced deep-dish apple pie is based on Lydia Maria Child's "Apple Pie," in The American Frugal Housewife (1833). Child's original recipe, with commentary, can be found in Keith Stavely and Kathleen Fitzgerald's Northern Hospitality: Cooking by the Book in New England (University of Massachusetts Press, 2011), p. 313.

MAKES ONE NINE-INCH PIE

8 SERVINGS

Preheat oven to 400°F.

Crust:

2 9-inch pie crusts, homemade or store bought

Filling:
10 cups tart apples, peeled, cored, and sliced (Macouns or Cortlands are nice apples for this pie; they can be found at farmers' markets and grocery stores in New England and elsewhere in the fall, though any tart baking apple, such as the Granny Smith, will work well.)
2 tablespoons sugar (or less, if you prefer a tart flavor or your apples are on the sweet side)
1⁄4 teaspoon ground cloves
1⁄2-3⁄4 teaspoon ground cinnamon

2 tablespoons rosewater, optional (A small amount of culinary rosewater, a traditional New England ingredient, adds a mild earthy flavor and a light floral scent to the pie; it can be found in some Indian and South Asian grocery stores, and online.)
1 teaspoon grated lemon peel

1⁄2 teaspoon lemon juice
1⁄4 teaspoon salt

Egg Wash:
1 egg yolk
2 tablespoons water

1 tablespoon butter, preferrably unsalted

Note: This large pie requires a deep-dish pie plate or tin.

Line a pie plate with one of the unbaked crusts, line the crust with parchment paper or aluminium foil, reaching up the sides of the crust, and fill with pie weights, dried beans, or rice. Bake for 10-15 minutes in a fully preheated 400°F oven.. Remove the crust from the oven, lift out the lining, prick the bottom of the crust, and cool it on a wire rack.

Increase the oven temperature to 425°F. Mix the sugar and spices into the apple slices. In a saucepan, cook the apple slices, stirring often, until they are just beginning to soften but still retain their shape. Add the rosewater, lemon peel, lemon juice and salt.

Fill the bottom crust with the cooked apple mixture and dot with the tablespoon of butter. Put on the top crust, carefully crimping both crusts together.

Place the pie on a baking sheet and bake for 10 minutes Reduce the oven heat to 350°F and bake for an additional 50 minutes. As the pie bakes, mix together the egg wash.

Remove the pie from the oven, brush the top crust with the egg wash, and bake for an additional 5- 10 minutes, until the crust is golden.

Cool the pie on a wire rack. Serve warm or at room temperature.

Since the pandemic spring of 2020, we've been attending a wonderful online workshop, led by food writer and historian of bread, William Rubel, called "Bread History and Practice." There's a Facebook group, too, for any who might be interested. For the December holiday group meeting, we decided to make 19th-century American author Lydia Maria Child's "Flour Bread," from The American Frugal Housewife, 1829. (We used the 1833 edition, as reproduced verbatim and with commentary in our book, Northern Hospitality: Cooking by the Book in New England, University of Massachusetts Press, 2011). 

Baking in December, in a wood-heated house, meant moving the sponge and dough around quite a bit to warm (but not too warm) spots while it bubbled and rose. Making bread and ferrying it around the house is good winter exercise! Read More 

In our book Northern Hospitality, we include a selection of apple pies from early New England, including some that originated in England. We've got recipes for "An Apple Pudding," by E. Smith from 1739 (a delightful custard pie), "An Apple Pye," by Hannah Glasse from 1747 (made in a dish, with no bottom crust and an elegant puff pastry topping), and even a poisonous one, Elizabeth Raffald's "A Codling Pye"(1769), in which the recommended method for cooking the codlings in a brass pan with vine leaves produced toxic verdigris! But let's leave those English cooks and their recipes be for now, and make a real American apple pie. Our all-time favorite early American version is a straightforward rendition by a great nineteenth-century American woman, Lydia Maria Child. Read our book--or just look around online--if you want to know more of Child's fascinating life. And after you do, may we suggest that in honor of her service to humanity, her personal integrity, her creativity--or simply because she was a great cook--you make her luscious apple pie? Read More 

The New Nativism--An Old Story
It has become almost a cliche to say that the present period of American history, beginning around 1975, is similar in many important ways to the period beginning roughly a hundred years earlier. We are living now, it appears, in a second Gilded Age, with pronounced inequalities of wealth and income and with transformative changes in our technology, economy, and the demographic profile of our society.

The last of the trends on this list—the arrival of lots of new people—has received much attention in the past few years from political commentators and is in the headlines almost every day in the coverage of the current presidential campaign, because of the xenophobia that constitutes the primary plank in the platform of the Republican candidate. Read More 

Mincing Medievalism
Mincemeat pie is a relic of the time centuries ago when two things were true of European food: one, that until Shakespeare's day pies were made more often with meat, poultry, or fish than with fruit or vegetables as the primary ingredient; and two, that very few dishes of any kind, including pies, tasted primarily sweet or primarily savory. Most dishes, including pies, offered what we would consider a blend of sweet and savory tastes, something like the sweet-and-sour items on a Chinese restaurant menu. Or like that American classic of the Betty Crocker era--ham baked with brown sugar and pineapple.  Read More 

Oys . . . Oys . . . Oysters!
In a couple of our previous posts—about Hannah Woolley's "To rost a Capon" and Hannah Glasse's "Cod Chowder"—oysters appear in supporting roles. It's high time to put them in the spotlight. Among all the shellfish enjoyed today, oysters alone have a history of continuous popularity and prestige that stretches back to Roman times. In the ancient world, in medieval Europe, in colonial and nineteenth century America, oysters were beloved by people in all walks of life. "Oys . . . Oys . . . Oysters!" is close to the cry used by oyster peddlers in the streets of Boston in the 1830s. Around the same time, America's first freestanding restaurants, not affiliated with inns or hotels, emerged, and these were almost all establishments that specialized in oysters. Some catered mainly to working people who stood at wooden bars at lunchtime, knocking back their oysters. Others were outfitted with booths and tables to appeal to a more well-heeled clientele. Read More 

Let Them Vote and Eat Cake
Believe it or not in our time of bitterly partisan politics, but Election Day used to be a holiday. In Massachusetts, for instance, in the colonial and early national periods, it took place in May, and, used as an occasion for the standing order to assert social dominance, it was planned to coincide with the Harvard Commencement and the annual meeting of the ministers of the Commonwealth's established churches. Grand processions, formal ceremonies such as the Election Sermon, an official counting of the vote, sumptuous dinners, and elegant afternoon and evening balls were highlights of the occasion.

In Connecticut, according to one account from the late nineteenth century, Read More 

New England is perhaps best known for pumpkin and apple pies. The fall season, when pumpkins and apples are ready for pie-making, is considered by many to be New England's best time of year. But the region's historic cookbooks also offer lots of great recipes for summer fruit pies as well, and we'll be telling you about some of them in this and upcoming posts.

We’ll start with a simple yet elegant recipe for cherry pie from the second cookbook ever written by a New Englander, The American Frugal Housewife (1829) by Lydia Maria Child.
 Read More