Feature article
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Serve a slice of history with Lane Cake
By Fred Sauceman
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This is cake season, as Valentine’s Day approaches, and for the past few days, I’ve been immersed in 19th-century sweetness.
The folks at Auburn University asked me to write about an iconic Southern cake for The Encyclopedia of Alabama, so I’ve been reacquainting myself, of late, with the work of Emma Rylander Lane, who died in 1904.
Mrs. Lane wasn’t a self-promoter. She had to be convinced that her cake creation should bear her last name.
At first, it was called the Prize cake, since it had captured first place in a baking contest at a county fair in Columbus, Georgia, where Mrs. Lane was demonstrating ranges.
Her cake, Mrs. Lane wrote, was “named not from my own conceit, but through the courtesy of Mrs. Janie McDowell Pruett, of Eufaula, Ala.”
My friend John Egerton, who literally wrote the book on Southern food, says the first time he baked a Lane cake, he was in the kitchen three hours.
It’s a type of sponge cake, made in layers, with a filling of butter, raisins and whiskey and a boiled, fluffy white frosting of water, sugar and whipped egg white.
For over a century, it has been a special occasion cake in the South and the pride of the state of Alabama.
In addition to the richness of the ingredients, part of its allure is its flirtation with the forbidden. Especially in the dry counties of Alabama, feasting on a whiskey-laced dessert was an adventure on the wild side. Home bakers who have objected to the whiskey or brandy in the original recipe have substituted grape juice, especially for children’s birthdays.
In the novel “To Kill a Mockingbird,” by Monroeville, Alabama, native Harper Lee, when Aunt Alexandra comes to live with the Finch family, Miss Maudie Atkinson bakes a Lane cake to welcome her. Noting the cake’s alcoholic kick, the character Scout remarks, “Miss Maudie baked a Lane cake so loaded with shinny it made me tight.” “Shinny” is a slang term for liquor.
The recipe was first printed in Mrs. Lane’s book “Some Good Things to Eat,” which she self-published in 1898. It’s been modified in many ways over the years. Coconut, dried fruit and nuts are common additions, but they are not included in the original recipe.
Mrs. Lane instructed that the Lane cake be made not in cake pans but rather pie tins. She specified “one wine-glass of good whiskey or brandy” for the filling and insisted that the icing be tested with a clean spoon. The raisins were to be “finely clipped.”
In Mrs. Lane’s day, her namesake cake would have been baked in a wood stove.
“The layers make the cake, not the icing,” says Neil Ravenna, culinary instructor and chef at Miss Melissa’s Café in Moundville, Alabama. “The cake itself is made with egg whites, almost like a sponge cake, so it will soak up all the bourbon and all the other wonderfully tasting things in there.”
Most bakers agree that the Lane cake is best if made a day or so in advance of serving, to allow those flavors to blend.
In Alabama, and throughout the South, the baking of an elegant, scratch-made, laborious Lane cake is a sign that a noteworthy life event is about to be celebrated. Chef Ravenna shared Mrs. Lane’s recipe with me.
-------------------------------Recipe-------------------------------
L A N E C A K E
Cake:
8 egg whites
1 cup butter
1 cup sweet milk
2 cups sifted sugar
3¼ cups sifted flour
2 teaspoons baking powder
1 tablespoon vanilla
Sift the flour and baking powder together three times. Cream the butter and sugar until perfectly light. Add to it alternately, a little at a time, milk and flour, until all are used, beginning and ending with flour. Last, beat in the well-whipped whites and vanilla. Bake in four layers, using medium-sized pie tins, with one layer of ungreased brown paper in the bottom of each tin.
Filling:
8 egg yolks
1 large cup sugar
½ cup butter
1 cup seeded, finely clipped raisins
1 wine-glass good whiskey or brandy
1 teaspoon vanilla
Beat well together egg yolks, sugar and butter. Pour into a small, deep stew pan and cook on top of the stove until quite thick, stirring all the time, or it will be sure to burn. When done and while still hot, put in raisins, whiskey or brandy and vanilla. Spread thickly between the layers and ice. It is much better to be made a day or two before using.
Icing:
White of 1 egg
1 cup granulated sugar
4 tablespoons boiling water
Put sugar into a perfectly clean, bright pan. Pour over it the boiling water, put it on a hot fire and stir carefully back and forth (not round and round as that will make the icing grain) until the sugar is all dissolved. Remove the spoon, wash it clean, dry it, and when the icing has boiled a few minutes dip up a spoonful, pour it back slowly and if it runs from the spoon in a fine thread it is done. Take it from the stove and pour slowly on the well-whipped egg white, beating carefully as you pour and continue beating until it is cool. Flavor to taste, and if the icing runs, put in a pinch of tartaric acid.
--------GoTriCities--------
Food writer Fred Sauceman, author of the book “The Place Setting: Timeless Tastes of the Mountain South — from Bright Hope to Frog Level,” is senior writer and executive assistant to the president for public affairs at East Tennessee State University. E-mail him at sauceman@etsu.edu.
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