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Almond Cream Filling
The whites of 2 eggs beaten stiff with 2 cups of XXX sugar, 1 teaspoon extract vanilla, 1 pint blanched almonds, chopped fine. Walnuts, pecans, hickory and butternuts are used in the same way.
Almond Filling, No. 2 1 cup XXX sugar 1 cup blanched almonds, (pounded or grated) 1/2 cup thick sour cream 1 tablespoon vanilla
Two uncooked nut fillings for layer cake, given in the shorthand of a period promotional cookbook that assumed the reader knew what a filling should look like. Both are stiff pastes rather than pourable frostings.
- XXX sugarConfectioners' sugar, graded by the number of X's for fineness. Modern powdered sugar (10X) is finer still and contains cornstarch, so start with slightly less than the stated 2 cups and add until the filling holds a peak.
- A pint of almondsBest read as measured whole after blanching rather than ground: a pint is 2 cups, roughly 10 oz / 280 g. Chopping fine by hand gives the texture the recipe expects; a food processor run too long turns them to butter.
- BlanchingPour boiling water over shelled almonds, let stand a minute, then slip off the skins and dry them thoroughly. Wet almonds will slacken the filling.
- Raw whitesNothing here is cooked. Use pasteurized egg whites or meringue powder if the cake is for children, the elderly, or anyone pregnant, and keep the finished cake refrigerated.
- Beating orderThe original reads 'beaten stiff with 2 cups of XXX sugar', so whites and sugar may have been worked together; beating the whites to stiff peaks first, then adding the sugar gradually and folding in the nuts last, gives a firmer filling.
- Thick sour creamAt this date this may well have meant raw cream soured at room temperature, thicker and tangier than the tub product. Commercial full-fat sour cream works; creme fraiche is closer still. Low-fat versions are too thin.
- A tablespoon of vanillaAs printed, and three times the teaspoon called for in No. 1. Extract strengths of the period varied and are poorly documented, so taste as you go; with modern extract 1 to 2 teaspoons may be enough in No. 2.
- Butternuts and hickoryBoth are wild American nuts now hard to buy; butternut in particular is scarce because of canker disease. Walnuts or pecans are the usual modern substitutes.
- YieldNo. 1 makes roughly twice as much as No. 2; No. 2 is about enough to fill a two-layer 8- or 9-inch cake. Neither is a keeping filling: assemble the day it is served.
The Gold Medal Flour Cook Book belongs to the wave of cookbooks issued by American milling companies around the turn of the twentieth century, printed to put a brand name in the kitchen and organized around the baking a household actually did. Nut fillings like these were an economical answer to a fancy cake: uncooked, requiring no thermometer or double boiler. The casual note that walnuts, pecans, hickory and butternuts "are used in the same way" says a good deal about the period pantry, when hickory nuts and butternuts could be gathered rather than bought and almonds had to be purchased. The second version, thickened with soured cream instead of egg white, belongs to a time when cream soured at home was a familiar ingredient rather than a cultured product from a tub.