Creoles
½ teaspoon salt 1½ cups pecan nut meats few grains cayenne Mix all ingredients in bowl; beat well. Fill small buttered fluted tins one half full. Decorate with pecans. Bake twelve to fifteen minutes. teaspoon salt
The text as printed here is incomplete — the ingredient list has been truncated, and the salt appears twice while the binder, sugar and eggs are missing entirely. What survives is enough to place the dish but not enough to bake from without filling gaps yourself.
- What is missing"Mix all ingredients" refers to a list that the page no longer carries. A cake of this kind would have needed some sweetened egg or sugar binder to carry the salt, cayenne and pecans that remain, but the surviving lines do not tell us which. Treat them as a description rather than a working formula, and use a complete pecan meringue or pecan drop-cake recipe for proportions.
- Few grains cayenneA pinch, no more; under 1/16 teaspoon for a batch this size. At that quantity it would season rather than register as heat.
- Fluted tinsSmall fluted gem or patty tins, roughly the size of a modern mini-muffin cup. A 24-cup mini-muffin pan is the closest equivalent; the recipe specifies buttered tins because sugary nut batters stick to metal.
- Half fullThe instruction is deliberate. These batters rise and then set, and a tin filled higher spills over the flutes and welds the cakes to the pan.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given, as was normal for the period, and the page does not even name an oven term. For cakes this small, twelve to fifteen minutes suggests something in the region of a moderate oven; a modern baker would try about 350F, lower if the batter turns out to be meringue-like and browns too fast.
- Pecan meatsA cup and a half is about 5 to 6 oz shelled. The recipe does not say whether to chop them; it reserves some for the decoration called for on top.
Lowney's Cook Book was published in 1907 by Maria Willett Howard for the Walter M. Lowney Company, the Boston chocolate manufacturer — one of the many corporate cookbooks that used general household recipes as a frame for the maker's own product. The name "Creoles" here signals the pecan rather than any specific New Orleans original, the nut being associated with Louisiana and the Gulf South, where the commercial pecan orchards of the late nineteenth century were concentrated. These are of a piece with the era's fondness for little baked nut cakes in fluted gem tins, served at afternoon tea or alongside ices.