In the Year of Fearless Baking: Detour #2: 18th Century “Leopard Cake”

It hasn’t been long since my last detour. To recap, just a few weeks ago I had some insomnia and stumbled upon a Spanish recipe for ‘Giraffe Bread’. Since I am a maniac, it follows that I had to immediately translate that recipe and give it a spin. The following week, I tried out the new technique with sourdough, which was deliciously successful. Food52 wrote this piece about it, which I hope will result in a wave of animal printed bread flooding my Instagram feed. A person can dream.

Which brings us to this week. Coincidentally, I was doing research at the Schlesinger Library at Harvard last week, and stumbled upon this recipe hiding in the middle of a hand-penned cookbook manuscript.

Leopard Cake. From a cookbook dated 1764. Too cool. And of course, since it seems that the precedent had already been set, if follows that I had to transcribe this recipe and try it out.

Since there are no mixing instructions at all, I had to draw on what I know about baking chemistry and make some assumptions. I also divided the recipe in half, because I almost always do when it comes to desserts.

What resulted is pretty cool. It’s basically half gingerbread and half Lady Baltimore cake, alternated in the pan to make stripes.

That’s right. Stripes, not spots. This makes me wonder about the place of the leopard in the popular imagination of the 18th century. Were people using the word ‘leopard’ to refer to a different animal (say, a tiger)? Or, were the big cats all just kind of lumped together in the American mind and presumed striped?

Which further begs the question: how much were people thinking about animals from ‘exotic’ locations during that time? ‘Leopard’ must have been a fashionable reference; did the mere word set the imagination free to wander arid deserts far away?

Over two hundred and fifty years after the ink dried on the page of that manuscript, here I am, eating cake and just wondering.