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gPHOTO BY ALLISON POTTER baltimore
LADY
If ever there were a cake built for elegant gatherings, this
is it. The grand lady of vintage cakes — baked in the photo
above for Wrightsville Beach Magazine by Phyllis Ramsey —
is a fluffy white chiffon three-layered dessert that sandwiches
a filling of chopped toasted nuts and dried fruit. The layers
are wrapped up in old-fashioned boiled frosting — soft and
billowing when spread, but hardened to a chewy meringue.
It was popularized by novelist Owen Wister. He picked
Charleston, South Carolina, as the setting of his romance
novel “Lady Baltimore” and modeled the central character
after one of the city’s former belles, Alicia Rhett Mayberry.
In the novel, Lady Baltimore creates a cake called Lady
Baltimore, and the description sent readers scrambling to find
a recipe.
Recipes for the cake started showing up in newspapers.
The owners of the Lady Baltimore Tea Room — who might
have developed the cake popularized by Wister — picked up
on the popularity and started baking and selling large num-bers
and shipping them across the country.
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