Recipe adapted from Seventy-Five Receipts for Pastries, Cakes, and Sweetmeats by Eliza Leslie.
This recipe highlights the use of an ingredient indigenous to the Americas: corn meal. A staple to the diets of those native to the continent, by the time of the recipe’s publication (1827) corn meal had long found its place on the plates of new arrivals as well. It appears in Seventy-Five Receipts for Pastry, Cakes, and Sweetmeats, the first baking and dessert book ever published in the United States.
The book’s author, Eliza Leslie, was a writer at heart. Her great love was for penning novels and children’s books, but fame came via recipe books. Seventy-Five Receipts was written after Eliza had been sent to a popular cookery school in Philadelphia in order to help at the family boarding house. The school was run by Elizabeth Goodfellow, a very well-regarded teacher, and most (if not all) of the recipes in Eliza’s book come from Mrs. Goodfellow—though Eliza insisted that they were all "…original, and have been used by the author and many of her friends with uniform success."
Eliza went on to write 16 more books, both fiction and nonfiction, before her death in 1858. Her 1837 book, Directions for Cookery, was the most popular cookbook of the 19th century and she even wrote an entire cookbook dedicated to corn meal, The Indian Meal Book, published in 1847.
The cake itself is very sweet—like the sweetest corn bread you’ve ever tasted—and redolent with nutmeg. I tested the recipe 6 times (!) and can attest that it is much better on the second (even third) day, the resting time giving it a chance to mellow in both sweetness and “egg-nog-ness.” Don’t be dissuaded by the long baking time—the modern baker in me balked at adding minutes, but the lengthy time in the oven is really needed to cook it all the way through. —Jessica Reed
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