Waldorf Cake (1909)

[Benjamin Barrett]

Thank you for posting this information, Barry. Just the other day, I had
taken to musing about the true origins of my family's secret Astoria Red
Cake recipe and if I could root it out from the Web. After your posting, I
found it on urban legend pages such as

http://chef2chef.com/features/cynthia/article/2001-01.shtml and
http://members.aol.com/gleposky/urbanlegends.html

I'd been told my whole life that someone in my dad's side of the family
purchased the recipe for a large sum of money (my mom says $500). Yesterday,
my dad told me it came through his aunt who told him the same story in the
60s. My mom verified one of the recipes I found on the Web, with just a
slight alteration to the ingredients.

My family has given the recipe out fairly liberally over the years, but I've
never run into another family who uses it as the standard for birthdays.

I guess we'll never know where our red cake originally came from, but this
makes the story all the better to tell!

Benjamin Barrett
Baking the World a Better Place
www.hiroki.us

-----Original Message-----
From: American Dialect Society [mailto:ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU] On Behalf Of
Bapopik at AOL.COM
Sent: Wednesday, 05 March 2003 6:17 PM

   I was asked about "Waldorf Cake," another name for "Red Velvet Cake."
There's a good Google discussion here (with the typo of Waldorf "Historia"):

http://groups.google.com/groups?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&
threadm=69jn27%24c3v%241%40nntp0.milwaukee.wi.ameritech.net&rnum=2&
prev=/groups%3Fq%3D%2522waldorf%2Bcake%2522%26hl%3Den%26lr%3D%26ie%3DUTF-8%2
6s

a%3DN%26tab%3Dwg

   13 June 1909, NEW YORK TIMES, pg. 7 ad for Bloomingdale's: WALDORF
CAKE--Raisin, plain, etc., per lb. ...12 c
(...)
_Demonstrations in the Grocery Department_
(...)
Waldorf Cake Co.  Cake.