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Nut Cake
One and one-half cups sugar, one-half cup butter, whites of three eggs, one cup milk, two cups of flour, two teaspoons baking powder, vanilla.
Filling-One cup chopped nuts, one cup cream, three-fourths cup sugar; cook until it thickens.
A plain white layer cake with a cooked cream-and-nut filling, written in the shorthand of a cook who already knew the method. The filling is the part that needs attention: it is essentially a nut penuche and will either set or run depending on how far you cook it.
- Oven and pansNothing is stated, so bake at 350F. The batter fills two 8-inch round pans for 25-30 minutes, or a single 8-inch square for about 35.
- Method implied, not statedCream the butter and sugar, add the milk alternately with the flour sifted with the baking powder, then fold in the whites beaten stiff. The whites are the only aeration beyond the powder, so do not stir them down.
- VanillaAn unmeasured "vanilla" is usually read as about a teaspoon.
- Whites of three eggsRoughly 1/3 to 3/8 cup. Eggs of the period were often smaller and more variable than today's large eggs, so measure by volume if your eggs are big. The leftover yolks were commonly put to use in a gold cake.
- The filling is a candyCook the cream and sugar together, stirring, until it reaches the soft-ball stage, 234-240F on a thermometer. "Until it thickens" is unreliable by eye: pulled too early it soaks into the cake, pulled too late it turns grainy and sets hard.
- CreamUse heavy cream. Nineteenth-century farm cream was thick and unhomogenized; light cream or half-and-half will need noticeably longer to reduce and may scorch.
- NutsAdd the nuts off the heat, after the syrup has cooled a minute or two, then spread while still fluid. Hickory nuts, butternuts or black walnuts would have been the common gathered nuts in the Northeast; English walnuts or pecans work.
- YieldOne two-layer cake, 8 to 10 servings. There is enough filling to go between the layers and thinly over the top.
Church and grange cookbooks are full of "nut cakes," and the nuts in question were usually gathered rather than bought: shagbark hickory, butternut and black walnut all grow widely. The cake itself is a straightforward white layer cake of the baking-powder era, the style generally said to have displaced older saleratus-and-sour-milk formulas as commercial baking powder became cheap toward the end of the nineteenth century. What dates it most precisely is the filling: a boiled cream-and-sugar syrup, the same technique behind penuche and maple cream, used here because a cook with a dairy had cream on hand and no need of a recipe that called for anything from a store. It has the character of a compiled community book, where each contributor assumed her neighbors knew how to mix a cake and only the proportions needed writing down.