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Hickory Nut Cake
½ 1/2 cup (scant) butter 1 cup granulated sugar 1 cup sour cream or milk 1 teaspoon soda 2 teaspoons cream of tartar Pinch of salt 1 cup hickory nut meats (chopped finely) 2 eggs 1½ cups (heaping) Five Roses flour
The book gives proportions only, in the style of its period, and leaves the method to the cook. What follows fills in the assumptions a 1913 baker would not have needed spelled out.
- The method the list assumesCream the butter and sugar, beat in the eggs, then add the sour cream alternately with the sifted dry ingredients, folding the floured nuts in last. Overworking after the flour goes in is what turns this from tender to tough.
- "Scant" and "heaping"Scant means just under the line, heaping means mounded above it before levelling. Read them as about 7 tablespoons of butter and roughly 1¾ cups of flour.
- Soda and cream of tartar togetherThis pairing is homemade baking powder, in the usual proportion of twice as much cream of tartar as soda, which is what the list gives. With sour cream or buttermilk the dairy contributes acid of its own on top of the cream of tartar, and period cookbooks commonly directed reducing or omitting the cream of tartar when sour milk was used.
- Sour cream then and nowThe sour cream of this book was thin, naturally soured raw cream, closer to today's crème fraîche loosened with buttermilk than to the thick cultured tub. Modern full-fat sour cream works; thin it slightly with milk to a pourable consistency.
- Hickory nutsShagbark hickory is a shell-it-yourself nut, hard to buy and slow to crack. Pecan is the same botanical genus and the standard stand-in; toast the meats and cool them before chopping, and toss them in a spoonful of the measured flour so they do not sink.
- Five Roses flourA Canadian hard-wheat all-purpose flour, stronger than most soft Southern flours. Ordinary all-purpose is the right substitute; nothing here calls for cake flour.
- Oven and panBake at 350F in a greased and floured 8- or 9-inch square pan or a loaf tin, 35 to 45 minutes, until a skewer comes out clean. The entry itself gives no oven direction.
- YieldAbout one 8-inch square cake, 9 to 12 servings. It is a plain, close-grained nut cake and keeps well wrapped for several days.
Hickory nut cake belongs to the North American nut-gathering economy that survived into the early twentieth century: shagbark and shellbark hickories drop in autumn across the eastern woodlands and southern Ontario, and the nuts were picked up free, dried, and cracked at home over the winter, which is why they turn up so readily in period cake books. The Five Roses Cook Book was published by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company of Montreal and distributed to promote its flour, with recipes gathered largely from Canadian housewives; its cake chapter is full of exactly this sort of proportion-only entry, written for readers assumed to know the creaming method by heart. The soda-and-cream-of-tartar leavening, rather than commercial baking powder, marks it as a formula inherited from the previous century, when cooks are often said to have mixed their own.