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Hickory-Nut Custard Cake
Cream one pound sugar and half pound butter; add five eggs beaten separately, one cup sweet milk, one pound flour, three teaspoons baking powder, flavor with lemon, and bake in jelly-pans. For custard, place one pint milk in a tin pail and set in boiling water; add a table-spoon of corn starch dissolved in a little milk, two eggs, one-half cup sugar, two cups chopped hickory-nut meats, well mixed together to the boiling milk; stir, and put between the layers of the cake, while both cake and custard are warm. This is excellent.
A big butter cake baked in thin layers and filled with a warm nut custard. The pound-weights convert cleanly, and the only real difficulty is the filling, which must be cooked properly and spread hot.
- The weights in cupsOne pound sugar is about 2 1/4 cups granulated; half a pound butter is 2 sticks. One pound flour is roughly 3 1/2 to 4 cups, depending on how it is scooped — weigh it at 450 g if you can, since this batter is stiff enough to be unforgiving of extra flour.
- Jelly-pans and ovenJelly-pans are shallow 8- or 9-inch round layer tins. This quantity of batter should fill three or four of them. The recipe gives no oven direction; a moderate oven, around 350F for roughly 20 to 25 minutes, suits thin layers — bake until the centre springs back.
- Eggs beaten separatelyWhites and yolks are beaten apart, the yolks going in with the creamed butter and the whipped whites folded in last. Combined with the baking powder, this is what keeps a pound-cake batter light enough for thin layers.
- The tin pail is a double boilerSetting a pail in boiling water is the period's improvised bain-marie. Use a heatproof bowl or the top of a double boiler; direct heat will scramble the eggs before the cornstarch has done its work.
- Cook the custard throughThe hinge of the recipe. Cornstarch does not reach full thickening power until the mixture actually bubbles, and the two eggs need that heat as well. Stir constantly and hold it at a slow boil for a minute after it thickens, or the filling will loosen and run out of the cake.
- Hickory nutsShagbark hickory is a wild native nut, hard-shelled and rarely sold; pecans are its closest commercial relative and substitute directly, cup for cup. Chop them fine — two cups of coarse pieces will keep the layers from sitting flat.
- Assemble warm, eat soonSpreading warm custard on warm cake lets it soak in slightly, which is the point. It also means the finished cake is a custard cake: refrigerate leftovers and eat within two days.
- Flavouring and yield"Flavor with lemon" means about a teaspoon of extract, or the grated zest of a lemon. The finished cake serves 12 to 16.
Buckeye Cookery and Practical Housekeeping (1877) grew out of Ohio church and community compiling, and hickory nuts are one of the ingredients that mark it as a book of the interior United States rather than the seaboard. Shagbark hickory grew wild across the Ohio Valley and the nuts were gathered in autumn, not bought — free food that took considerable labor to shell, which is why two cups of chopped meats reads as a genuine extravagance here rather than a convenience. The cake itself is a standard pound-cake batter lightened with baking powder, a leavening that had only become widely available commercially in the decades before this book appeared, though the book's cake chapter relies on soda and cream of tartar, yeast and beaten eggs just as often. Layer cakes filled with a boiled custard were a fixture of the period's company table, and the whole thing could be assembled while still warm and carried to a supper.<n>