The most popular legend of the Lady Baltimore is that Alicia Rhett Mayberry, a Southern belle, baked and served the cake to novelist Owen Wister in Charleston, South Carolina. Wister was said to have been so enamored with the cake that he used it as the namesake of his novel, Lady Baltimore. Wister included a description of the cake in Lady Baltimore: According to food historians, the cake may have actually originated with Florence and Nina Ottelengui, the longtime managers of Charleston's Lady Baltimore Tea Room, who developed the cake based on a version of the common Queen cake from the late nineteenth century. The Ottelenguis are said to have annually baked and shipped a cake to Owen Wister as a "thanks" for making their creation famous, and were known to ship hundreds of cakes around the country at Christmastime. The first recorded mentions of a cake with the name of "Lady Baltimore" began appearing in 1906, with several newspaper articles referring to it as the "famous" or "original" cake.
Recipe
The first printings of the recipe were copied in several newspapers, including Harrisburg, Pennsylvania's Daily Gazette and Bulletin, The Columbus Journal, and The Washington Times, in 1906: Modern versions of the recipe may call for a meringue, boiled, or seven-minute frosting, and may include rum or liqueurs in the filling. The cake itself may be white or yellow. There is also a version known as the "Lord Baltimore cake" made with the leftover egg yolks instead of whites.
In The Simpsons' episode "Grade School Confidential", one of the cakes featured in Agnes Skinner's book is a Lady Baltimore cake. In the movie Because I Said So, Diane Keaton's character states that she found her mother's recipe for Lady Baltimore cake. In Upper World, Warren William's character orders a Lady Baltimore cake for his wife, played by Mary Astor. In 3 Godfathers, John Wayne’s character thanks the banker’s daughter for baking him a Lady Baltimore cake with a file in it. In the playArsenic and Old Lace, Abby asks her sister, Martha, if there is any more Lady Baltimore cake left to celebrate their nephew, Mortimer's, engagement to the next door neighbor, Reverend's daughter, Elaine. The production company Rooster Teeth also used the cake’s name in one of its teasers for their series The Weird Place. On the production company’s YouTube channel “LetsPlay” the teaser was used multiple times before videos to promote the series, and due to it seemingly sounding nonsensical it created a joke inside the community that Jack, the character who mentions the cake, can’t ever seem to get his Lady Baltimore right. In John Cheever's story "The Wrysons," the character Donald Wryson hides baking a Lady Baltimore cake from his wife in the middle of the night.
