The regional table / Alabama
Lane Cake with Raisin and Whiskey Filling
The cake is in print under its own name, in its author's own book, and the book settles every argument about it in nine lines.
Almost nothing on this site has a named author and a named book behind it. This does. The wrapper reads, in black letter, Some Good Things to Eat — Price, 50 Cts. — Mrs. Emma Rylander Lane, Clayton, Alabama — Copyrighted 1898. Inside, the title page gives the book its working name: My Best Cakes, Salads, Croquettes, Etc., With a Few Choice Miscellaneous Recipes Kindly Contributed by My Friends, printed at Macon, Georgia, by the press of the J. W. Burke Company in 1898. She dedicates it to her mother, who gave her the love of the culinary art, and to her husband, whose discriminating and appreciative appetite had been her inspiration for nearly seventeen years. The preface says the fifty-cent price puts it within easy reach of Southern housekeepers, that every recipe has been carefully tested, and that the dishes will be found suited to Southern tastes, Southern cooks and Southern markets. The copy read here is the Auburn University Libraries scan of the Patrick Cather collection of Alabama cookbooks, and on page 40, after a note on egg-yolk fillings, the heading is set in small capitals: LANE CAKE. The filling runs over onto page 41 and ends in her own voice — it is much better made a day or two before using, it is her prize cake, and it was named, she writes, not from her own conceit but through the courtesy of Mrs. Janie McDowell Pruett, of Eufaula, Alabama. Eufaula and Clayton sit in the same Barbour County, twenty-odd miles apart. So the woman did not name the cake after herself; the next town over did it for her.
What the page prints is a white butter cake — eight whites, a cup of butter, a cup of sweet milk, two cups of sugar, three and a quarter cups of sifted flour, two teaspoons of baking powder, a tablespoon of vanilla, baked in four layers in medium-sized pie tins on ungreased brown paper — and a filling of eight yolks, a large cup of sugar and half a cup of butter cooked on top of the stove until quite thick, stirring all the time, with a cup of seeded and finely clipped raisins, one wine-glass of good whiskey or brandy and a teaspoon of vanilla stirred in while it is still hot. That is the whole of it. There is no coconut and there are no pecans: the word pecan does not appear anywhere in the book, and cocoanut appears three times, in a fruit salad and two custards, never within thirty pages of this cake. She does not say bourbon either — the word is not in the book. The frosting is not named in the recipe, which ends only "Spread thickly between the layers and ice", but her icing chapter opens with Plain Boiled Icing, boiled sugar poured onto a whipped white and beaten until cool, and tells you to double the quantity for a medium-size cake; so the soft white boiled icing is the house default and is as old as the recipe, while the coconut and the nuts are somebody's later improvement and cannot be dated from anything that opened here. Dating the name is easier than dating the drift. Georgia Historic Newspapers, searched by exact phrase and sorted by date, gives the earliest genuine printing as 30 June 1910 in the Americus Times-Recorder, a banquet menu for the visiting press association — Pound Cake. Lane Cake. Coffee. — reprinted in the Hamilton Journal of 29 July when the dinner had been eaten; two apparently earlier hits are both false, an 1884 report where the OCR turned "take" into "cake" behind General Lane, and an 1894 Savannah price list selling Lane Cake Soap at three cents. Americus was her town: the same paper carried her small advertisement on 20 and 27 January 1901, wanting to do fancy cooking of all kinds, special attention given to receptions, orders taken at B. H. Mayo's store, the Woman's Exchange and 711 Lee street, Mrs. Emma Rylander Lane. Three years later, on 26 April 1904, it printed her death — pneumonia, suddenly, at Cananea in Mexico, the wife of Davis T. Lane and the daughter of the late Maj. Emory Rylander — and on 5 May her funeral was held straight from the railway depot as the body came off the train. Her preface had promised a second volume. Nebraska's newspaper archive, which is open and deep, contains the phrase exactly once, in 1961: this cake never left the South. It is also the cake a neighbour bakes in Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird, loaded with enough liquor to make a child tipsy, which is the only reason most people outside Alabama have heard of it.
Why this version works
It is better a day or two old. Her line, not a modern embellishment. A cooked yolk filling is dense and wet and the layers next to it are dry and porous; given a night under a cover, the whiskey and the raisin moisture move outward into the crumb and the cake becomes one thing instead of three. Eaten the hour it is iced, it tastes like a good white cake with something sticky in the middle.
Eight whites up, eight yolks down. The cake takes the whites and the filling takes the yolks, and the count is the same on both sides. That is not a coincidence in a book that tells you, two pages earlier, that this sort of filling can be made any time there is an accumulation of egg yolks and will keep for weeks. Nothing is left over and nothing is thrown away, which is why the architecture survived in farm kitchens for a century.
Four thin layers, not two fat ones. She says four, in medium-sized pie tins, and her baking note says all layer cakes should be baked rapidly. Four layers give three seams of filling instead of one, so every forkful gets raisins and whiskey rather than an inch of plain white cake with a stripe somewhere in it. Thin layers also bake through before the crumb dries.
The filling is a curd, not a frosting. Yolks, sugar and butter cooked on direct heat until quite thick is a custard taken past the point where a custard would stop. It sets to a sliceable paste when cold, which is what holds four thin layers in a stack. Her warning is the part to obey: stir all the time, or it will be sure to burn. There is no flour and no cornstarch in it to protect you.
