Walnut Cake
One cup white sugar, two cups flour, one-half cup butter, onehalf cup milk, two eggs, one teaspoon baking powder, one cur walnut meats, one cup raisins chopped fine.
A plain butter cake with nuts and raisins, given in the shorthand of a period when every cook knew what to do with a list like this. The ingredients are all still current; what is missing is the method, the pan and the oven.
- The missing methodCream the butter with the sugar, beat in the eggs, then add the flour sifted with the baking powder alternately with the milk. Fold the walnuts and raisins in last, tossed with a spoonful of the measured flour so they do not sink.
- Pan and ovenThis batter would fill a single 8- or 9-inch round or square pan, or a small loaf pan. The recipe gives no oven or timing; around 350F for roughly 35 to 45 minutes, until a skewer comes out clean, suits a batter of this size.
- "One cur walnut meats"A typesetting slip for one cup. "Walnut meats" simply means shelled walnut kernels; chop them coarsely.
- Butter and saltHalf a cup is one stick, 4 oz. Butter of this period was often salted, and no salt appears in the list; if using unsalted butter, a quarter teaspoon would not go amiss.
- Baking powder strengthOne teaspoon to two cups of flour is light by modern standards. Period baking powders varied considerably in strength, and today's double-acting powder at 1 1/2 teaspoons will give a more reliable rise.
- RaisinsChopped fine, as directed, so they disperse rather than clump. Old raisins were often seeded at home; modern seedless raisins can go straight in, though a brief soak in hot water keeps them from drying out in the crumb.
- YieldAround ten to twelve slices. It should keep well wrapped for several days.
The formula is a plain butter cake scaled small, of the sort that filled community and church cookbooks by the hundred, and the walnuts and raisins are what distinguish it from its near-identical neighbours. Black walnuts and English walnuts were both common in American kitchens of the period, the former often gathered rather than bought; the recipe's silence on which to use suggests the cook was expected to have whatever was on hand. The telegraphic style — no oven, no timing, no method — was common in books of this kind, which assumed a cook who already knew how a cake was made and needed only the proportions.