Home › Cake and Bread Recipes › Hickory Nut Cake
Hickory Nut Cake
1½ cupfuls hickory nut meats I lb. (2 cups) sugar 1/2 lb. (I cup) butter 3 eggs 1/2 pint (I cup) buttermilk 1 teaspoonful baking soda I lb. (4 cups) sifted flour 1/4 teaspoonful salt 1 teaspoonful almond extract Cream the butter and sugar together, then add the eggs well beaten, the salt, extract, the soda dissolved in the buttermilk, flour, and the nuts chopped.
Mix carefully and pour into a buttered and floured casserole and bake in a moderate oven for one hour.
A heavy buttermilk butter cake in the pound-cake tradition, baked in the earthenware casserole that gives this book its title. The proportions are given by weight first, which is the more reliable guide.
- "Casserole" means the dish, not the stewIn this book a casserole is a glazed earthenware or stoneware baking dish, used here uncovered as a cake pan. Any deep ceramic dish large enough to hold this batter with room to rise will do; butter and flour it thoroughly, since a batter this rich sticks.
- Moderate ovenModerate is generally taken as about 350F. In a deep dish the batter is thick and slow to set, so treat the hour as a starting point and test with a skewer at the centre.
- Trust the pound weightsWeigh rather than scoop: 450g flour, 450g sugar, 225g butter. One cup of butter is two sticks.
- Hickory nutsShagbark and shellbark hickory are rarely sold and are brutal to crack. Pecans are the same genus and the closest substitute in flavour and fat; black walnuts are a stronger, more assertive stand-in. Chop to pea size so they suspend in the batter rather than sinking.
- Buttermilk and sodaThe soda is the only leavening and depends on the acid in the buttermilk. Cultured supermarket buttermilk is acid enough. Dissolve the soda in the buttermilk as directed and get the cake into the oven promptly, since the reaction begins at once.
- "Mix carefully"This probably means gently rather than thoroughly. Fold the flour in until it just disappears; overbeating a batter this stiff develops gluten and can give a tough crumb.
- Almond extractA full teaspoon of almond extract is forceful; half a teaspoon lets the nuts show through.
- Yield and servingAbout 12 to 16 slices. Cool it in the dish at least half an hour before turning out, or it will break; a cake this buttery improves after a day wrapped at room temperature.
Hickory nuts are a gathered rather than farmed ingredient: the shagbark and shellbark hickories (Carya), North American trees, drop nuts that are sweet and rich but locked in thick, irregular shells, which is why they stayed a home and country-kitchen ingredient while the thinner-shelled pecan became the commercial crop. Hickory nut cake turns up throughout nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American cookbooks, in a variety of forms, meant to use up a autumn's worth of cracked nuts. Its appearance in a book of casserole cookery reflects the appeal of glazed earthenware dishes that could go from oven to table, a single vessel that could handle soups, meats, puddings and, as here, a plain cake.