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Hickory-Nut Cake (Two cups sugar one of milk)
Two cups sugar, one of milk, two-thirds cup butter, three of flour, three eggs, two tea-spoons baking-powder, a cup nut-kernels cut fine. Tried, and not found wanting. - Mrs. Judge West, Bellefontaine.
A plain butter cake with nuts folded in, written in the shorthand of a cook who assumed you already knew the method. Everything not stated below is left to you: creaming, pan, oven, time.
- The method the recipe omitsCream the butter and sugar, beat in the eggs, then add the flour sifted with the baking powder alternately with the milk. Toss the chopped nuts in a spoonful of the measured flour before folding them in so they do not sink.
- Measurements in gramsTwo cups sugar is about 400 g, two-thirds cup butter about 150 g, three cups flour about 375 g, one cup milk 240 ml. Nineteenth-century cup measures were not standardised, but were often near enough to today's 8 fl oz that a straight conversion is a reasonable starting point.
- FlourPeriod flour was generally softer and lower in protein than modern all-purpose. Measure by spooning into the cup and levelling, or use a mix of all-purpose and cake flour, or the crumb will come out tight.
- Baking powderTwo teaspoons in three cups of flour is on the low side by current standards. The powders of the 1870s were single-acting; modern double-acting powder at two teaspoons will work, but get the batter into the oven promptly.
- Oven and panNo temperature is given. Bake at 350F: about 30 to 35 minutes in two 9-inch layers, 45 to 55 minutes in a tube pan or loaf. It is done when a skewer comes out clean and the edges pull from the tin.
- Hickory nutsShagbark hickory kernels are sweet and mildly resinous, rarely sold shelled. Pecans are the closest common substitute; black walnuts are more assertive and taste quite different from hickory, though they too were within reach of a nineteenth-century Ohio cook.
- YieldRoughly a two-layer 9-inch cake or a large tube cake, twelve to sixteen servings. It is an everyday butter cake and takes a boiled or brown-sugar frosting well.
Buckeye Cookery and Practical Housekeeping was compiled in Ohio in the 1870s from recipes contributed by named women in named towns, and the attribution here to Mrs. Judge West of Bellefontaine is part of the book's method: the contributor's standing in her community was the guarantee of the recipe, which is also why she bothers to add "tried, and not found wanting." Hickory nuts were a genuinely local ingredient rather than a specialty purchase. Shagbark hickory grows through the Ohio Valley, the nuts drop in autumn, and gathering and cracking them was household work, done through the winter evenings. That is why the recipe says only "a cup nut-kernels cut fine" without a word on where to get them. Nut cakes of this kind, essentially a cup-measure butter cake with whatever the season provided folded in, run through American community cookbooks of the period alongside their walnut, almond and coconut variants.