The 1948 Joy of Cooking and My 12-Egg Yolk Yellow Cake with Orange Custard Filling and Lemon Buttercream

This one takes the cake, so to speak...

 

For my friend's birthday I made her an angel food cake. It took 12 egg whites. I was not about to throw out 12 egg yolks and there's no way I could eat enough mayonnaise, zabaglione, or bechamel to get through these things in the short amount of time they can be kept in the fridge. So they got frozen.*

Then the perfect occasion came. Serendipitous, really. I had to make cakes for the Japanese Canadian Cultural Centre Craft and Cake Sale. So 6 yolks for the 3-yolk cakes, and 6 yolks for the orange custard.

From where did I get such a recipe in a land of low-fat everything? The 1948 Joy of Cooking.

Just thinking about this book makes me a little giddy. It's in my house, on my bookshelf, and I cook from it whenever I want. It's a relic, like a piece of history living in my house. It's torn up, taped up and beautiful. The wonderful Irma Rombauer...her personality gets steam-rolled in the later editions, but early on she was present in every chapter, in every recipe, with fast quips, helpful suggestions, and dated commentaries. For example, the first chapter is "cocktails", and starts like this:

"The chief virtue of cocktails is their informal quality. They loosen the tongues and unbutton the reserves of the socially diffident. Serve them by all means, preferably in the living room, and the sooner the better."

She follows this up respectably with:

"To give this book the impression of sobriety and stability it deserves, the alcoholic cocktails have been relegated to the chapter on Beverages. There they may blush unseen by those who disapprove of them and they may be readily found in the company of many other good drinks by those who do not."

Incredibly well-said. Her nonalcoholic cocktails range from juices to oysters to pineapple boats. Very American. Other chapters start with wonderful introductions such as the chapter on fish which first describes the skinning and filleting process, but then dives into a Chinese proverb, and then the following:

"First, we must determine which is the best way to cook our fish."

Our fish, Irma. We're in this together.

Then there's the section on sweetbreads. I'm not sure if the modern version of the book includes the recipe for larded sweetbreads with wine sauce. Too bad. Or baked brains, tomatoes, and eggs. Breakfast of champions. Irma was definitely a champion.

Some of the best moments are her sections of "general rules", including "general rules for making pie crust" and her dictionary of baking that describes the differences between creaming, blending, cutting in, and kneading. Then there's the following description for the Queen Mary's Sponge Cake:

"When King George was sick, his wife, who is reported to have that inborn thing, 'a light hand with pastry,' bought a book of Marie Corelli's and baked a sponge cake for him....This recipe makes a large, delicate, fine-grained cake, which, if somewhat uninteresting, makes up for that by being highly digestible."

I didn't immediately think a light hand with pastry was what she meant by "that inborn thing", being royalty and all...

For the egg-yolk cake I initially planned on making the "Gold Cake", and the following description was provided:

"This recipe calls for 8 egg yolks. The cake is light and palatable."

Encouraging, Ms. Rombauer.

Light? Maybe not. And "palatable" is not usually how I think of cake. I love her honesty, though. It really seemed as though she didn't want anyone to make this cake. So I didn't. I made the 3-yolk sponge instead and doubled the recipe.

Ms. Rombauer has a lot of rules, so to make this cake I had to go back and read the opening of the sponge cake section. She says not to disturb the balance of the recipes by careless measuring. Sift flour three times. In her day, people sifted over paper. Does anyone still sift over paper? She gives the ratio of bread flour to cake flour if substitutions must be made. Then there are the separate rules for mixing with an electric mixer. Typically her mixing is done with a whisk. Fore-arms of steel, she had.

Ingredients:
Egg yolks
Sugar
Salt
boiling water
cake flour (exchanged for bread flour with Ms. Rombauer's proper ratio)
baking powder
vanilla
grated orange rind

Simple, right? I was not going to mess this one up. I even sifted the sugar and salt twice as suggested before blending it in to the beaten, light egg yolks. Then in went the water, the thrice-sifted flour (maybe I only did it twice...maybe, because then she threw a fast one by saying to sift again with the baking powder), and beat only as much as I needed to combine it all before adding the vanilla and orange rind. I baked it in an 8" baking dish and a piece of aluminum I'd shaped around my one 8" baking dish (...) and baked in my 350 degree oven for 30 minutes. Perfect. Of course it was perfect. It's Rombauer's Joy of Cooking.

To come: Orange custard (aka what I did with the other 6 egg yolks) and lemon buttercream (because I ran out of orange juice...)

*You just mix 1 1/2 tsp of sugar with every four yolks (if you're going to use them for sweet dishes) or an 1/8th teaspoon of salt for every four (for savoury dishes). The yolk doesn't really freeze solid, so it was overkill of me to freeze them in ice cube trays to make sure they could be easily separated later. I didn't plan to use them all at once...well, oops.