Cake: Overview

From the beginning of the nineteenth century through the middle of the twentieth, cake baking was a passion among American women, so much so that Juliet Corson remarked, in her cookbook of 1885, that most other “American cookery-books” of her time were “chiefly made up of” cake recipes. Early on, American home bakers chose to countermand European taste principles and embrace the expedience of chemical leavening. This decision, originally controversial, marked American cake as different from all others and steered its course, promoting a vast repertory of cakes with distinctive tastes and textures, stunning colors, and imposing, sometimes improbable forms.