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Almond, Hickory-Nut or Cocoa-Nut Cake
One pound flour, half tea-spoon salt, fourth pound butter, pound of sugar, tea-cup sour cream, four eggs, lemon flavor to taste, and a tea-spoon soda dissolved in two tea-spoons hot water; mix all thoroughly, grate in the white part of a cocoa-nut, or stir in a pint of chopped hickory-nuts, or a pint of blanched almonds pounded. -Mrs. J. W. Grubbs, Richmond, Ind.
A plain sour-cream cake with three interchangeable finishes, written for cooks who weighed flour and sugar rather than measuring them. The original gives no pan, no oven and no time, so those have to be supplied.
- Weights to volumeOne pound of flour is about 3 1/2 to 4 cups, and it is safer to weigh it (450 g) than to scoop it. A pound of sugar is roughly 2 1/4 cups; a quarter pound of butter is one stick.
- A tea-cupIn nineteenth-century American receipts a tea-cup is usually smaller than a modern measuring cup, commonly reckoned at about 3/4 cup. Take the sour cream as roughly 6 fl oz.
- Sour creamThe 1870s article was thick soured raw cream, noticeably acidic. Commercial cultured sour cream works and is close in acidity; ordinary sweet cream will not, because the soda has nothing to react with and the cake will taste soapy.
- SodaThe teaspoon of soda is the only chemical leavening here; the four eggs also do some of the lifting. Dissolve it, stir it in last, and get the cake into the oven promptly — the reaction begins the moment it meets the cream.
- Oven and panBake at 350F. The batter fills a 9x13 pan or two loaf tins; allow 45 to 55 minutes for the sheet, a little longer for loaves, and test with a skewer.
- The nutsA pint of chopped hickory nuts is about 2 cups; hickories can be replaced with pecans, their closest relative in flavour. Almonds "pounded" means ground to a coarse meal — in a food processor, pulse with a spoonful of the sugar to keep the oil from turning them to paste.
- Cocoa-nutGrating the white part of a fresh coconut yields roughly 3 to 4 cups, moist and unsweetened. Packaged sweetened flaked coconut is a different ingredient; if you use it, reduce the sugar somewhat.
- YieldA large, close-grained cake serving 12 to 16. It keeps well wrapped for several days and is better on the second day.
Buckeye Cookery and Practical Housekeeping (Minneapolis, 1877, compiled by Estelle Woods Wilcox) was built from recipes sent in by named contributors across the Midwest, which is why this one carries Mrs. Grubbs of Richmond, Indiana. The three-way choice of nut is characteristic of the period's cake chapters: the batter is the recipe, and the flavouring is whatever the household has. Hickory nuts were gathered locally and free for the shelling in much of Ohio and Indiana; almonds and coconuts came by rail from the grocer, the coconut still in its shell, which is why the instruction is to grate rather than to open a bag. The sour cream and soda pairing belongs to a period when chemical baking powder, though already commercially available and used elsewhere in this very book, had not displaced older methods in every kitchen. Cooks still had cream in their dairy, and a cup of cream that had turned was an asset rather than a loss.