By Sandra Dallas

The auction of elegant cakes that was held earlier this year at the Hamill House would have pleased the Hamill ladies and their women friends. No dessert was more popular in Victorian times than cake. Pie was all right, but it was everyday food. Cake was company fare. A pie in its tin plate on the dining room sideboard could never compare to a cake displayed on a crystal stand.

Pastry shops built splendid cake towers, iced with swirls of colored frosting and decorated with candies and other confections. Commercial bakers had an array of special tin molds that could turn out cakes in fanciful shapes, such as castles, with towers and turrets and battlements. But even the humble home baker took pride in her cakes, although cook stoves with their uneven temperatures, not to mention the vagaries of cooking at an altitude higher than sea level, made cake-baking fraught with disaster.

"The baking of cakes is more affected by the high altitude than anything else we cook," wrote Caroline Trask Norton in her The Rocky Mountain Cook Book, published in Denver. And it went without saying that the higher the altitude, the greater the risk of a spoiled cake. Norton advised adding one more egg.

Most cookbooks ignored the altitude problem, however. In fact, recipes weren't much help to cooks anywhere, because they did little but list ingredients and give vague directions. You were on your own for oven temperature and baking time and often for mixing instructions. National cookbooks gave general instructions. The White House Cook Book, the Joy of Cooking of its time, instructed, "Use none but the best materials, and all the ingredients should be properly prepared before commencing to mix any of them." It advised cooks to throw "on the floor of the oven a tablespoonful of new flour. If the flour takes fire, or assumes a dark brown color, the temperature is too high…if the flour remains white after the lapse of a few seconds, the temperature is too low."

For pies, the proof of the pudding was in the eating. But cakes were judged on their appearance. And the winner at potlucks and church suppers was the one that was eaten first. Woe to the husband who bypassed his wife's cake at such an event. Even children knew better than to choose another offering before their mother's cake was gone.

Nineteenth-century cookbooks had chapters just for cakes, and Colorado cookbooks were no different. Among the cake recipes in local cookbooks: Pork, Vanity, Surprise, Sixty (your guess is as good as mine), Sunshine, Mashed Potato Chocolate, and Civil War cake. (The last contains one pound of fat salt pork.)

In keeping with the upcoming holiday season, here is a recipe for a Fruit Cake from a nineteenth-century handwritten recipe book (punctuation and capitalization are quoted as originally written):

Fruit Cake
3 lbs. Flour, 3 lbs. Butter, 4 lbs. Sugar, 28 Eggs, 6 lbs. Raisins, 6 lbs. Currants, 3 lbs. Citron, 2 lbs. Figgs [sic], 1/2 oz. Mace, 1 oz. Nutmeg, 1/2 pint French Brandy, 1 table Spoonful Cloves, 1 of Cinnamon.
8 Loaves.