Old New England Election Cake (1887)

From The White House Cook Book, 1887

The Story Behind This Recipe

A famous title, a home cook’s manual

The title promises state dinners. Mostly, the book delivers good sense about running a house. Fanny Lemira Gillette was nearly 60 when The White House Cook Book first appeared in 1887, and no First Lady, past or present, had helped write it. Beyond photographs of First Ladies, plus menus and dinner-management notes in some editions, very little inside concerns the White House. It was sold as a household manual built on decades of practical housekeeping.

The White House flavor came largely from Hugo Ziemann, a White House steward who co-authored later editions and supplied the menus and the chapters on directing White House dinners. A Michigan State University library biography says he had earlier been caterer to the exiled son of Napoleon III and steward at the Hotel Splendide in Paris. Gillette went on to write several more cookbooks before her death in 1926, and her book kept getting revised, with an edition as late as 1996.

Thirty quarts of flour and a holiday

Picture thirty quarts of flour. That is how Amelia Simmons began her election cake in the 1796 second edition of American Cookery, followed by ten pounds of butter, fourteen pounds of sugar, twelve pounds of raisins and a quart of brandy. The dough was wet with milk overnight, and the fruit went in just before baking. Food historian Stephen Schmidt traced the dish to the ‘great cakes’ colonists baked for celebrations, huge fruited and spiced breads, and called Election Cake ‘simply a version of the great cake they baked on election day.’ Connecticut recipes date to 1771, the same year cake appeared in the colony’s itemized Election Day spending.

The occasion deserved it. Election Day was a genuine holiday in early New England, when voters came into Hartford to cast ballots and stayed to socialize. The cake gave women, who could not vote, a public way to show patriotism. It also traveled under other names, including ‘Lection cake, Oak Cake, and Training or Muster Cake, the last two from militia training days that packed towns with crowds. Botanist John Howard Redfield, raised in Connecticut, remembered it at weddings and high teas as well. The Hartford connection came later, in the 1830s, as the city’s Election Day parades and balls grew grander.

Where Gillette’s version fits

Gillette keeps the old rhythm. Milk, sugar and a full cup of yeast are stirred to a batter and left overnight. In the morning come more sugar, butter, three eggs, half a nutmeg, cinnamon, a pound of raisins and a gill of brandy, and the cake rises again in greased pans ‘until quite light before baking.’ It is close kin to the yeast-raised election cake in the 1833 edition of Lydia Maria Child’s The American Frugal Housewife.

Two details give away the date. Her half-teaspoon of soda nods to a century in which chemical leaveners pushed yeast cakes aside. And her batch fits a family kitchen, a long way from Simmons’s thirty quarts. Then there is the flour, which she never mentions. Readers were trusted to know how much it took to make ‘a batter,’ an assumption the same book makes about its huckleberry cake.