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Madeira Nut Cakes
Half a pound of butter, one pound sugar, one pound flour, two teaspoonfuls of baking powder, three eggs; leave out the white of one of the eggs. Half a cup of sweet milk, a little salt; roll out thin and cut in squares or any fancy shape, then rub the top of them with the white of the egg and sprinkle white sugar over them. Place one-half of a madeira nut in the center of each cake and bake quickly.
A plain rolled sugar cookie with a walnut half pressed into the top. The proportions are given by weight, which makes it easy to scale, but the dough needs chilling before it will roll thin.
- Madeira nuts are walnuts"Madeira nut" was a common nineteenth-century American name for Juglans regia, the English or Persian walnut, as distinct from the native black walnut. Use ordinary walnut halves; black walnut has a much stronger, resinous flavor that will dominate the cookie.
- Weights, not cupsHalf a pound of butter is 2 sticks (225 g). One pound of sugar is about 2 1/4 cups; one pound of flour is roughly 3 1/2 cups, though weighing is more reliable here since the ratio of flour to sugar is what keeps the dough rollable.
- Sweet milkThis means fresh unsoured whole milk, specified because many recipes of the period called for sour milk with saleratus. Half a cup of whole milk is correct as written; the baking powder does all the leavening.
- Chill the doughWith this much butter and sugar the dough is soft and will tear rather than roll. Wrap and refrigerate at least an hour, then roll in batches on a lightly floured board, keeping the rest cold.
- "Bake quickly"For thin rolled cakes this is usually taken to mean a hot oven; around 400-425F works, at which they will likely need only 7 to 10 minutes and can go from pale to overbrowned very fast at the end, so watch the edges rather than the clock.
- The reserved whiteThe white left out of the batter is the wash. Beat it slack with a fork until no ropy strands remain, brush it thin, then sprinkle sugar and press the nut in so the wash glues it down. Without the wash the walnuts are much more likely to come loose after baking.
- YieldA full batch on a pound of flour makes roughly five to six dozen small cakes, depending on how thin you roll and how large the cutter is. The dough halves cleanly if that is more than you want.
- KeepingThese are dry, sturdy supper cakes rather than soft cookies. They keep a week in a tin; store them fully cool or the sugar topping goes tacky.
The name is the interesting thing here. Through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries Americans called the European walnut a "Madeira nut," a trade name generally explained as reflecting the route much of the imported crop took through the Atlantic islands, before expanding California orchards made the nut cheaper and domestic over the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Cookbooks of the period use "Madeira nut," "English walnut" and "Persian walnut" more or less interchangeably, usually in contrast to the native black walnut, which was free for the gathering and correspondingly less genteel. That this recipe sits under Supper rather than Dessert also fits the period pattern in which the evening meal in many American households was a light spread of bread, cold meats, preserves and sweet biscuits like these, with the substantial cooked meal taken in the middle of the day.