American Cookery, the first American cookbook published in 1796, is intended for a drastically different audience. Here is a recipe from that book:
Election Cake
Thirty quarts flour, 10 pound butter, 14 pound sugar, 12 pound raisins, 3 doz eggs, one pint wine, one quart brandy, 4 ounces cinnamon, 4 ounces fine colander seed, 3 ounces ground allspice; wet the flour with milk to the consistence of bread over night, adding one quart yeast; the next morning work the butter and sugar together for half an hour, which will render the cake much lighter and whiter; when it has rise light work in every other ingredient except the plumbs, which work in when going into the oven.( Simmons, 43-44).
The ingredients for this recipe are listed with specific quantities; those quantities are massive. The recipe again doesn’ t specify what dish to cook this in or how long to cook it for, but it is implied that it would have to be made in several different layers or else significantly scaled down by the chef. The cake is leavened with yeast, although this cookbook does at times call for chemical leavener( pearlash, an American invention and“ precursor of baking soda”( Stavely and
Fitzgerald). Because this recipe doesn’ t include a chemical leavener, it instructs the cook to whip butter and sugar together for half an hour to make it lighter, and calls for“ plumbs” to be added at the end, which refers to the raisins called for in the ingredient list.
The election cake recipe is one of the less practical recipes in the book, designed to impress on“ occasions when the aim was to express greater gentility”( Stavely and Fitzgerald) like Election Day, which
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