History of Lady Baltimore Cake

Photo from Aki's Kitchen website

A Southern specialty with many recipe variations. A favorite wedding cake, this mountainous cake is a white cake topped with a boiled or "Seven Minute Frosting." What makes the cake so distinctive is the combination of chopped nuts and dried or candied fruits in its frosting.

1906 - Owen Wister (1860-1938), a popular novelist, picked Charleston, South Carolina, as the setting of his new romance novel. He modeled the central character, Lady Baltimore, after one of the city's former belles, Alicia Rhett Mayberry. In the novel, Lady Baltimore created a cake also called "Lady Baltimore."  Wister's description of the cake sent readers of his novel scrambling to find the recipe, which had not been created yet. In his novel, Wister wrote:

"I should like a slice, if you please, of Lady Baltimore," I said with extreme formality. I returned to the table and she brought me the cake, and I had my first felicitous meeting with Lady Baltimore. Oh, my goodness! Did you ever taste it? It's all soft, and it's in layers, and it has nuts - but I can't write any more about it; my mouth waters too much. Delighted surprise caused me once more to speak aloud, and with my mouth full, "But, dear me, this is delicious!"

According to historians, Florence and Nina Ottelengui, who managed Charleston's Lady Baltimore Tea Room for a quarter of a century, developed the cake toward the end of the nineteenth century from a version of the common "Queen Cake" of that period; They are said to have annually baked and shipped a cake to Owen Wister. At Christmastime, they shipped hundreds of white boxes carrying tall, round fragile gift cakes to all parts of the country.