Nut Cake
Take two cupfuls of sugar, three cups of flour, one cup of butter, one cup of sweet milk, four eggs, one teaspoonful of soda, (cream tarter, two teaspoonfuls), two cups of chopped English walnuts or hickery nuts.
A plain 19th-century butter cake in the old proportions, with the nuts folded in at the end. The recipe gives no pan, no oven and no time, so those are the gaps to fill.
- Method the recipe assumesCream the butter and sugar, beat in the eggs, then add the flour and milk alternately with the soda and cream of tartar sifted into the flour. The nuts go in last, tossed with a spoonful of the measured flour so they do not sink.
- Soda and cream of tartarOne teaspoon soda with two of cream of tartar is homemade baking powder in the standard 1:2 ratio. Substituting four teaspoons of modern double-acting baking powder gives a comparable lift; if you do, omit both the soda and the cream of tartar.
- Sweet milkSimply fresh unsoured milk, named to distinguish it from the buttermilk or clabbered milk that many cakes of the period used with soda alone. Whole milk is the right choice.
- Cup measuresPeriod cups varied, but treating the cup as 8 fl oz works here. One cup of butter is two sticks, 8 oz; three cups of flour is roughly 12-13 1/2 oz spooned and levelled, and the batter is stiff enough that a little extra milk is no crime.
- ButterPeriod butter was often salted and sometimes worked with water still in it. Use unsalted butter at cool room temperature and add half a teaspoon of salt, which the recipe omits entirely.
- NutsHickory nuts are a wild American nut, sweet and rich, and worth using if you can get them; black walnuts stand in better than English walnuts for that flavour. Toast whichever you use for ten minutes at 350F before chopping.
- Pan and ovenThe quantity fills a 10-inch tube pan or three 9-inch layers. Bake at 350F, about 55-65 minutes for the tube pan or 30-35 for layers, until a skewer comes out clean.
- YieldAround 16 servings. It keeps well wrapped for three or four days and, like most heavily buttered nut cakes, slices better on the second day.
Nut cakes appear with increasing frequency in American household books through the later nineteenth century. The recipe's alternative of "English walnuts or hickery nuts" is a small map of the American pantry: the English walnut was the bought nut, imported or from California orchards, while hickory nuts were gathered locally and cracked at home. The soda-and-cream-of-tartar pairing is characteristic of the period, when commercial baking powders were available but the two ingredients were still commonly combined at home; the alum content of packaged brands was a subject of public controversy.