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Hickory Nut Cake
1 cup butter 2 1/2 cups sugar 1 cup milk 5 eggs 3 1/2 cups Gold Medal flour 1 teaspoon salt 2 teaspoons baking powder 2 cups hickory nut meats 1/2 lb. citron 1 lb. raisins 1 oz. each candied lemon and orange peel In mixing, follow the directions as given for butter cakes. Bake in two sheets for one hour.
A big fruit-and-nut butter cake of the sort that stood in for a light fruitcake at holidays. The original assumes you already know the butter-cake method, so most of the work here is filling in what the book left unsaid.
- "Follow the directions for butter cakes"The book's butter-cake directions are not given here. The usual period method is to cream the butter and sugar until pale, beat in the egg yolks, add the sifted dry ingredients alternately with the milk, then fold in the stiffly beaten whites last. Whites folded in at the end help lighten a batter this heavy.
- Flour the fruit and nutsToss the raisins, citron, peel and nut meats with a few spoonfuls of the measured flour before folding them in. Two cups of nuts and a pound and a half of fruit will otherwise sink to the bottom of the pan.
- Oven temperatureThe book gives none. A rich cake this size wants a moderate oven, 325-350F, for the full hour; hotter and the crust sets and darkens long before the middle is done. Test with a skewer in the center.
- "Two sheets"What the book meant by a sheet is not spelled out. Divide the batter between two pans, greased and lined; two pans of about 9 inches, or two large loaf pans, will take it. The quantity is far too much for one tin.
- Hickory nutsShagbark hickory is a genuine American nut with a flavor close to pecan but sweeter and more resinous. Unless you have a tree or a farmers' market source, pecans are the usual substitute and go in at the same measure.
- CitronCandied citron, now mostly a specialty item around the winter holidays; in American use the name covered candied citron fruit and also candied citron melon. Half a pound is a lot of it; if you dislike the medicinal edge, replace part with more candied orange peel.
- Flour measurementPeriod recipes generally assume flour sifted before measuring and spooned lightly into the cup. Scooping a modern cup packs in noticeably more; 3 1/2 cups measured the old way is about 14 oz, or 400 g.
- Yield and keepingTwo large cakes, roughly 24 to 30 servings. Like most fruited butter cakes it improves after a day or two wrapped tightly, and it slices far more cleanly cold.
The Gold Medal Flour Cook Book was published by Washburn-Crosby, the Minneapolis milling firm that became General Mills, and like most miller's books it exists to sell flour. Hickory nut cake belongs to the older American habit of baking with whatever nut the region gave you free. Shagbark hickory grew across the eastern and midwestern states, and the nuts were gathered in autumn and cracked at home through the winter. The load of citron, raisins and candied peel here marks this as a holiday or company cake rather than an everyday one; it sits at the point where a rich butter cake shades into what an English cook would have called a light fruitcake. Commercial hickory nut meats never became viable at scale, since the shells are hard and the kernels awkward to extract by machine, part of why the pecan came to dominate twentieth-century baking, though the connection is inference rather than documented fact.