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Hickory-Nut Cakes
One egg, half cup flour, a cup sugar, a cup nuts sliced fine; drop on buttered tins one tea-spoonful in a place, two inches apart. Or, roll and bake like sand tarts. - Mrs. Lamb, Bellefontaine, Ohio.
A four-ingredient drop cookie of the kind that shows up throughout the confectionery chapters of nineteenth-century community books: no butter, no leavening, the egg doing all the binding. It works, but the proportions leave no margin, so beat the egg thoroughly and expect a stiff batter.
- "Cakes" means cookiesIn this book a small drop "cake" is what we would call a cookie. Nothing is baked in a pan or layered.
- MeasuresA cup here is roughly today's 8-ounce cup: about 7 oz sugar, about 2.5 oz flour, and 4 oz or so of shelled nuts. The egg is the only liquid, so measure the flour lightly or the mixture will be too dry to drop.
- OvenNo baking temperature is given; wood- and coal-fired ranges of the period rarely had a usable thermometer. A modern 325-350F for 10 to 12 minutes, until set and lightly colored at the edges, suits them; these are mostly sugar and will scorch quickly past that point.
- Hickory nutsShagbark hickory nuts were gathered, not bought, and are still hard to find shelled. Pecans are the closest relative in flavor and texture and substitute directly; walnuts work but are sharper.
- "Sliced fine"Sliced, not ground. Chop the nuts to small flakes so the batter still holds together; a food processor run too long will turn them to paste and the cookies will spread into a single sheet.
- Buttered tinsButtered sheets were standard, but a sugar-heavy batter with no fat of its own sticks stubbornly. Parchment is the practical modern answer, and lets the cookies cool on the paper before lifting.
- The sand-tart variationSand tarts are rolled thin, cut, and baked crisp. Rolling this batter requires it to be chilled and firm first, and the result is a brittle wafer rather than a soft drop.
- YieldThe recipe gives no count. Teaspoonfuls of this quantity of batter, set two inches apart, run to several dozen small cookies and will need more than two sheets.
Buckeye Cookery (1877) grew out of Ohio church and household networks, and its contributed recipes are signed with towns like Bellefontaine. Shagbark and shellbark hickory nuts were a genuinely free ingredient in much of Ohio: gathered in autumn, hulled, and cracked through the winter, they were a common household nut in a period when almonds and coconut had to be bought. The sand tart the recipe offers as an alternative is generally traced to Pennsylvania German baking, a thin rolled sugar cookie that spread widely through Midwestern manuscript and community cookbooks in the same decades.