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Southern Cake
1/2 C butter. 1 1/2 C sugar. Yolks of 3 eggs. 2 C flour. Signa E. Nelson. 1 t baking powder ½ C walnut meats, cut small Mix 2 t flour with nuts Put 1 cup of dates, cut small, and 1 C seedless raisins and 1 t soda in a bowl. Pour 1 C boiling water over them. Mix all ingredients together, adding the stiffly beaten whites of 3 eggs last. Bake in loaf 1 hour or in layers 15 minutes.
Mrs. E. J. Brixen.
This is a typescript casualty: the printed list gives leavening, nuts, dates, raisins and egg whites, but the flour, sugar and shortening that must have stood at the head of the recipe never made it onto the page. What follows explains the parts that survive and where the gaps are.
- AbbreviationsIn this book t is a teaspoon and C a cup. So 1 teaspoon baking powder, 1 teaspoon soda, 1½ cups walnuts, 1 cup each dates and raisins.
- The missing bulkThere is no flour quantity, no sugar and no fat given beyond the 2 teaspoons of flour used to dredge the nuts. A loaf of this size in contemporary collections typically runs to about 1½ to 2 cups flour with roughly a cup of sugar, but that is inference, not what the recipe says. If you want a dependable result, work from a current date-and-walnut loaf and treat this page as a record rather than a set of directions.
- Soda on the fruitPouring boiling water over dates, raisins and soda softens the fruit and starts the alkali reacting with the fruit acids. The recipe gives no instruction here, but the mixture is best left to cool to lukewarm before it meets the eggs, or the beaten whites are likely to collapse.
- Flouring the nutsThe 2 teaspoons of flour tossed with the walnuts keep them suspended rather than sinking to the bottom of the loaf. Do the same with the chopped dates if they are very sticky.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given. A loaf of this type wants a moderate oven, 325 to 350F; the layers, being thin, want 350 to 375F.
- Baking timesOne hour for the loaf is plausible at 325 to 350F in a standard 9x5 pan; test with a skewer at 50 minutes, since a fruit-heavy batter browns before the centre sets. Fifteen minutes for layers is short but workable for two thin 8-inch pans.
- Egg whites onlyOnly the whites of 3 eggs are called for, and the recipe asks for them stiffly beaten and added last. Whites without yolks would tend to a paler crumb, though with the flour, sugar and fat missing there is no judging the finished cake from what survives.
- YieldPresumably one loaf, or two thin layers, though with the flour and sugar missing the size cannot be fixed. Cakes like this cut better the day after baking, wrapped once cool.
Community cookbooks of this kind were assembled from cards and slips handed in by contributors, then set in type by whoever had the job, which is why a page can carry two names and lose half its ingredient list along the way. The cake itself belongs to a large family of American date-and-nut loaves that spread quickly once packaged dates and shelled walnuts became cheap grocery items in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; the soda-and-boiling-water treatment of the dried fruit is the standard trick of the type. Nothing in the recipe points to a Southern origin for the name "Southern Cake", which may say more about the era's fondness for regional labels than about geography.