Cooking for Profit: a new American cookbook adapted for the use of all who serve meals for a price, by Jessup Whitehead (1893)
The White House cookbook : a comprehensive cyclopedia of information for the home; containing cooking, toilet, and household recipes, menus, dinner-giving, table etiquette, care of the sick, health suggestions, facts worth knowing, etc. (1900)
The first of these books is unique because it is not intended for private homes, but people who are trying to make a living. As such, it suggests sneaky tricks to maximize profit while maintaining customer health and happiness. Think if you have seen any of these nowadays…. Examples:
1.) Lots of fish have a whole bunch of names. Collect these, and when you have a glut of one particular sort, just pick a different one of its names for the menu every day, so people think they are getting something new and fancy.
2.) Do not skimp on bread! Always make really good bread no matter what, because then people will fill up on bread, which is cheap, and not eat lots of the expensive stuff.
3.) When using expensive fruit like berries for fillings, use mostly apple cut with just enough juice and berries to make it colored and flavored.
The real best part of the book is the running account of the author’s feud with her neighbor Mrs. Tingee, a rival and frenemy.
My custard pies are big and fat — three big cups of custard in each one, and there is room to dive down deep in them; but this! Oh, Mrs. Tingee how could you! It is only the ghost, the shadow, the skeleton of a custard pie. […]Her custard pie is primped and crimped around the edges, but there is nothing of it. It consists of a sheet of bottom crust about as thin as paper, with a yellow layer of custard about as deep as a sheet of blotting paper upon it.
Mrs. Tingee also has something against Italians.
“I never could understand,”said Mrs. Tingee, one day, "how the Italians can be so poor, as the papers say they are, and yet eat so much macaroni as the papers tell us they do : I should think it would break them up buying eggs to cook it with.”
How dare they eat pasta! They are too poor to eat pasta, even homemade! They are probably just pretending to be poor, to trick decent people, when here they are splashing out on a couple eggs shared between the whole family! OUTRAGEOUS.
I had 5 egg whites leftover from when my daughter made ice cream, so a no-fuss white cake recipe (that doesn’t mind a little bit of egg yolk contamination) seemed just the ticket! I put in some raspberry flavoring and the last little bit of raspberry jam in the jar. The #1 most common cake frosting in cookbooks of this era is raw egg white with powdered sugar, or a couple variations of the same. As raw eggs are not quite The Thing nowadays for safety reasons, I was glad to see the author recommend an alternative gelatin recipe. It was kind of chonky and gelatinous (which…makes sense), but her recommendation of putting it in a warm place (in this case, a microwave for about a minute and a half) worked like a charm. This coating should prevent the cake getting hard and gross for a few days!
609— Good White Cake.
A great deal of the fuss and labor some people go through every time a white cake is to be made is altogether needless : to prove it try this easy cake and be surprised that it can be put together so quickly.
2 cups sugar — a pound.
1 cup melted butter— 1/2 pound.
10 whites of eggs.
1 cup milk.
2 teaspoons baking powder.
1 teaspoon cream tartar.
6 cups flour — 1 1/2 pounds.
Put the sugar and melted butter into the mixing pan along with the whites, not whipped, then take the wire egg beater and beat them together a minute or two; add the milk, powder, cream tartar and flour and some flavoring extract if you choose, and beat it up with a spoon thoroughly. The more it is beaten the whiter and finer the cake. If there is no cream tartar handy use the juice of a lemon. Makes nearly 4 pounds; costs 34 cents. Ought to be frosted the easy way. No. 3; or, with frosting that will slice without breaking. No. 635.
635— Cake Frosting without Eggs.
It is not necessary to have white of eggs to make cake icing or frosting. A better kind of frosting that will not break when the cake is sliced, is made of either dissolved gelatine or powdered gum arabic. They need only be dissolved in boiling water to make a mucilage like the common bottle mucilage in thickness, then beat up sugar in it just the same as with white of eggs. It is quicker to make than the egg kind and is extremely white. If too thick on the cakes, set them in a warm place and this kind of frosting will run down smooth and flossy. There is a powdered kind of gelatin called granulated, that is very good for this purpose.
GELATINE FROSTING. [White House Cookbook]
Soak one teaspoonful of gelatine in one tablespoonful of cold water half an hour, dissolve in two tablespoonfuls of hot water; add one cup of powdered sugar and stir until smooth.
Before heating: clumpy and mucusy
Verdict: Not a bad cake at all! Kind of dense, more so than than when one whips the egg whites separately to stiff peaks, but not a problem. It rose a lot in the middle, which made it donut shaped in the Bundt pan, so possibly better in a loaf pan. I made half the recipe and baked it at 350 F. for 45 minutes. All agreed the frosting was better than the stuff from a jar from the store, but not as good as say, buttercream. It’s somewhere between a powdered sugar/water glaze and a frosting, and it does give a beautiful glossy sheen.
