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Hickory Nut Filling
1 C hickory nut meats 1 C sour cream 1 C sugar 1 heaping T flour Mix together and cook until clear. Makes filling for three layers. Note: Mrs. M. Pester omits the flour.
Mrs. Leonard Disney Mrs. F. J. Wagner.
A cooked cream-and-sugar filling thickened with a little flour, of the kind church cookbooks turned out by the dozen. It comes together in about ten minutes on the stove and lives or dies by how you handle the heat.
- The hinge: cook it gently, stirringSugar, cream and flour scorch fast and the mixture will break if it is rushed over high heat. Use a heavy saucepan over medium-low, stir constantly with a flat-edged spoon, and expect 8-12 minutes.
- "Cook until clear"This is the flour signal. Raw flour makes the mixture look cloudy and chalky; once the starch has gelatinized the filling turns glossy and translucent and coats a spoon thickly. Mrs. Pester's flourless version has no such clear stage, and the recipe gives no other cue; in the absence of one, cook until a spoonful cooled on a saucer holds its shape.
- Sour cream then and nowIn a book of this vintage this most likely meant raw cream skimmed from the top of the milk and left to sour naturally, thicker and richer than the modern product though the fat content would have varied. Modern cultured sour cream, at 18 percent milkfat or above, is the closest match; use full-fat, not light. The extra water in low-fat versions will lengthen the cooking time and can cause curdling.
- Hickory nutsShagbark hickory was a gathered nut across the Midwest rather than a bought one, which is why it can turn up in a community cookbook without comment. Pecans are the same genus and the standard substitute; a cup of meats is about 4 oz. Toasting them 8 minutes at 350F sharpens the flavor considerably.
- When to add the nutsThe recipe says to mix everything together, but chopped nuts sitting on the bottom of the pan invite scorching. Stirring them in off the heat at the end keeps them crisper and the filling smoother.
- "1 heaping T flour"More than a level tablespoon (about 8 g), so read it as somewhere in the 12-15 g range. Precision matters less here than the visual cue; more flour gives a stiffer, more paste-like filling, less gives a caramel-soft one.
- Yield and assemblySomething over two cups once the nuts are in, enough to fill between the layers of a three-layer cake as stated, not to coat the sides. Let it cool to lukewarm before spreading or it will run off the crumb.
- KeepingThis is a dairy filling with no acid protection to speak of once the sugar is diluted by cake. Refrigerate the finished cake and eat it within two or three days.
Hickory nuts were a free ingredient well into the twentieth century, gathered from shagbark trees in fencerows and woodlots in October and shelled at home through the winter, which is why they appear in Midwestern community cookbooks in quantities no one would buy today. The filling itself belongs to a large family of cooked cream fillings: cream, granulated sugar and a spoonful of flour boiled to thickness give a filling that spreads and sets without a mixer. The presence of two contributors' names and a note that a third woman leaves out the flour is a fair record of how such books were made, by collecting variants of a dish everyone in the congregation already knew rather than by writing a single authoritative version.