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Walnut Cake (One-half cup butter yolks)
One-half cup butter, yolks of three eggs, one-half cup of milk, one cup sugar, whites of two eggs, one and three-fourths cups flour, one and one-half teaspoons baking powder, three-fourths cup walnuts. Beat butter and sugar, add milk, next flour and baking powder sifted together, and lastly the walnuts and whites of the eggs well beaten; bake half an hour.
— Mrs. Charles Deer
A plain butter cake of the sort every church and grange cookbook carried, with the method compressed to a single sentence. Two things in it need attention before you start: the yolks and the oven.
- The missing yolksThree yolks are listed but never mentioned again in the method. Beat them into the creamed butter and sugar before the milk goes in. Note also that only two whites are used — the third white is left over.
- Oven temperatureNo temperature is given at all. 350F is a reasonable choice for a cake this size, and it should be done in about the half hour the recipe states.
- PanThe batter fits one 8-inch round or square pan, or a small loaf. Grease and flour it, or line the base with parchment. In a larger pan it will be thin and dry well before the half hour is out.
- Creaming"Beat butter and sugar" means beat them pale and light, several minutes with a mixer. This is the only leavening help the cake gets beyond the powder, and the whites folded in at the end.
- The whitesBeat them to soft, not stiff, peaks and fold them in last with a light hand. Stirring them in the way you stirred the flour undoes the point of separating them.
- WalnutsThree-quarters of a cup, chopped. The recipe says only "walnuts." If black walnuts were intended, they are far stronger and more resinous than the English walnuts sold today, and worth trying if you want a more assertive flavor.
- Baking powderA teaspoon and a half for 1 3/4 cups of flour is close to modern practice. Many powders of the period were single-acting, so it does no harm to get the batter into the pan promptly.
- YieldOne modest single-layer cake, eight to ten small squares. A plain everyday cake rather than a party cake.
Cakes like this one sit in the middle of the American home-baking transition: butter and eggs beaten by hand as they had been for a century, but leavened with commercial baking powder, which spread through country kitchens in the decades after the Civil War and increasingly displaced saleratus and sour milk in this kind of receipt. The proportions — half a cup of butter, a cup of sugar, under two cups of flour — mark it as an everyday cake rather than a rich occasion cake, stretched and given interest by a handful of nuts. Community cookbooks such as this one printed each contributor's name beside her recipe, as here with Mrs. Charles Deer, which was both credit and quiet endorsement.