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Walnut Cake
1/2 cup butter 1 3/4 cups flour 1 cup sugar 2 3/4 teaspoons baking powder Yolks 3 eggs Whites 2 eggs 1/2 cup milk 3/4 cup walnut meat, broken in pieces 1/2 teaspoon salt Mix ingredients in order given. Bake forty-five minutes in a moderate oven. Cover with White Mountain Cream, crease in squares, and put one-half walnut on each square.
A plain butter cake with walnuts folded in, finished with boiled frosting. The recipe assumes the reader knows the standard creaming method, and it gives no pan size.
- "Mix ingredients in order given"The book's usual shorthand for the standard butter-cake method: cream the butter, beat in the sugar, then the egg yolks, add the milk alternately with the flour sifted with baking powder and salt, stir in the walnuts, and fold in the stiffly beaten whites last. Note that this is the conventional reading rather than the literal list order, in which the flour appears second and the milk after the whites. Folding the whites in at the end helps keep the crumb light.
- Moderate ovenConventionally read as somewhere around 350 to 375F; the book gives no temperature. Forty-five minutes suits a single 8-inch square or a small loaf; baked shallower it will be done sooner. Test with a skewer in the centre.
- Pan size and yieldNo tin is specified. An 8-inch square pan, buttered and floured, gives a cake of the right depth for creasing into squares as directed, and serves nine to twelve.
- Baking powder2 3/4 teaspoons is generous for 1 3/4 cups of flour by current standards, where 1 to 1 1/4 teaspoons per cup is usual. Commercial powders of the period varied in strength, so the quantity may not have acted as strongly as it would today; with modern double-acting powder, 2 teaspoons should be enough to raise this batter.
- The odd eggThree yolks and two whites means one white is left over, which will do for the frosting: White Mountain Cream is a boiled icing made by pouring hot sugar syrup in a thread into beaten egg white and whipping until it holds its shape.
- Walnut meats"Walnut meat" is simply shelled walnut kernels. Toasting them dry for a few minutes before breaking them up improves the flavour considerably, and tossing them in a spoonful of the measured flour keeps them from sinking.
- FinishingFrost the top while the icing is still soft, score it into squares with a knife before it sets firm, then press half a walnut into each square. Once boiled frosting crusts it cracks rather than creases.
Nut cakes became common in American cookbooks alongside reliable chemical leavening, and by the turn of the twentieth century the English walnut -- planted commercially in southern California from the 1860s and 1870s onward -- was cheap enough to scatter through an everyday cake. The finish here, White Mountain Cream, a boiled sugar syrup beaten into egg white, was a standard frosting of the period, and it sets firm enough to be marked into portions before serving, as the recipe directs.