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Silver Nut Cake
1 cupful sugar 1/2 cupful Crisco 4 whites of eggs 1/2 teaspoonful vanilla extract 2 cupfuls flour 1/2 teaspoonful salt 3 teaspoonfuls baking powder 1 cupful chopped pecans or English walnut meats 1/2 cupful milk Cream Crisco and sugar. Sift dry ingredients and add to Crisco mixture, alternating with the milk; add nuts and vanilla extract. Beat egg whites to stiff froth and fold in at last. Turn into Criscoed and floured cake tin and bake in moderate oven thirty-five minutes.
Sufficient for one small cake.
A standard white butter-cake batter with nuts folded in, written for the Crisco kitchen of the 1910s. It works as written; the notes below cover the vocabulary and a couple of points of technique.
- Moderate ovenThe book gives no temperatures; a moderate oven is conventionally taken as roughly 350-375F. Start testing with a skewer before the full thirty-five minutes, since a shallower pan will finish sooner.
- CriscoThe book is a Procter & Gamble promotional volume, so the shortening is named throughout. Modern all-vegetable shortening behaves the same way; an equal weight of softened unsalted butter gives better flavour but a slightly denser, less snow-white crumb.
- "Criscoed and floured"Simply grease and flour the tin. Parchment on the base saves the effort of coaxing out a cake full of nuts.
- CupfulsAn early twentieth-century American cup is the same 8 fl oz measure used today. By weight: sugar about 200 g, flour about 240 g, milk 120 ml, shortening about 100 g.
- FlourUse all-purpose. The 3 teaspoons of baking powder is a large but deliberate amount, so do not add more, and do not substitute self-raising flour.
- Why the whites go in lastThe whites are the only lift beyond the baking powder and they are folded, not beaten, into a batter already stiff with nuts. Lighten the batter with a third of the whites first, then fold in the rest in two additions to keep the volume.
- NutsChop the pecans or walnuts fairly fine and toss them with a spoonful of the measured flour before adding, or they sink. Toasting them first for 8 minutes at 350F sharpens the flavour.
- Yield"one small cake" means a single small tin or layer, perhaps eight servings. The recipe doubles cleanly for two layers if you want to fill and ice it.
"Silver cake" is the old kitchen name for a cake made with egg whites only, the counterpart to "gold cake" made with the yolks; nineteenth-century cookbooks routinely printed the pair together so that a household breaking eggs for one had a use for the other half. Adding a cup of chopped pecans or walnuts turns it into a silver nut cake, a common American variation once shelled nutmeats became cheap and widely sold. The recipe's insistence on Crisco suggests, though it does not establish, that it belongs to the tradition of cookery books Procter & Gamble commissioned after the shortening's 1911 introduction, written to persuade cooks that a hydrogenated vegetable fat could replace butter and lard in everything from pastry to cake. A white cake made with a pure-white fat was a good advertisement, and books of this kind did much to naturalise shortening in the American baking repertoire.