White Nut Cake
2¼ cups pastry flour. 4 teaspoons baking powder. 1/4 teaspoon salt.
Whites 4 eggs beaten until stiff. 1/2 teaspoon Almond extract. 1 cup English walnut meats broken in pieces.
PROCESS: Cream Cottolene, add sugar gradually, beating constantly. Mix and sift flour, baking powder and salt, add alternately to first mixture with water, add nut meats and extract; cut and fold in whites of eggs. Bake in a sheet thirty-five minutes in a moderate oven. Spread with
A white layer-style cake leavened with baking powder and stiff egg whites, from a book that was published in the interest of a shortening brand. The ingredient list as printed is incomplete, so read the notes before shopping.
- Missing quantitiesThe verbatim text gives no amount for the Cottolene, the sugar or the water, though all three appear in the method. A cake of this type and flour weight would conventionally run around half a cup of fat, a cup and a half of sugar and three-quarters of a cup of water, but that is inference, not the book's instruction.
- CottoleneA branded shortening of cottonseed oil stiffened with beef suet, widely sold in America from the late nineteenth century and long gone. Any solid vegetable shortening creams the same way; butter gives better flavour but a slightly less white crumb, which was the whole point of the original.
- Pastry flourSofter and lower in protein than all-purpose. Substitute cake flour straight across, or replace two tablespoons of each cup of all-purpose flour with cornstarch.
- Moderate ovenConventionally read as about 350F, though period usage runs anywhere from 350 to 375F. Thirty-five minutes suits a cake baked in a sheet; check at twenty-five if your pan is shallow.
- Baked in a sheetNot a modern sheet pan. The book gives no dimensions; a batter of this size would suit a rectangular pan on the order of 9x13 inches and an inch or more deep, cut into squares after frosting.
- Almond extractHalf a teaspoon in a cake this size is assertive by current taste; reduce it if you prefer, though the book calls for the full half teaspoon.
- The frostingThe instruction ends mid-sentence at "Spread with." A period white cake of this kind was commonly finished with a boiled white icing or a plain confectioners' sugar frosting, often with more walnuts pressed on top.
- YieldRoughly twelve to sixteen squares, depending on the pan you use.
52 Sunday Dinners was a promotional cookbook issued by the makers of Cottolene, a cottonseed-oil shortening that competed directly with lard in American kitchens around the turn of the twentieth century; the recipes call for the product by name, which is why the ingredient reads as a brand rather than a description. The cake itself belongs to the large family of white cakes made possible by cheap chemical baking powder and cheap refined sugar, both of which had become ordinary household goods by the 1880s. "English walnut" distinguishes the familiar Juglans regia from the native black walnut, which is stronger and darker and would have spoiled the whiteness the recipe is built around. Almond extract paired with walnuts may have served to deepen a nut flavour without adding colour, though how widespread the practice was is unclear.