Nut Cake
Add one cup chopped walnuts to Silver Cake mixture, and flavor with vanilla instead of almond. 1/4 cup butter 1 cup sugar 2 egg yolks + teaspoon salt
This is a variation entry rather than a standalone recipe: it assumes you have the book's Silver Cake in front of you, and the ingredient list printed beneath it is a partial, garbled fragment of that base formula. Treat the walnuts and the vanilla as the only real instructions here.
- The list is incompleteA cake cannot be built from 1/4 cup butter, 1 cup sugar, two yolks and salt — there is no flour, liquid or leavening. The "+ teaspoon salt" is almost certainly a mangled fraction, most likely 1/4 teaspoon. Work from the full Silver Cake recipe rather than these lines.
- What Silver Cake meansA silver cake is a white butter cake made with stiffly beaten egg whites (usually with baking powder as well), the counterpart to a gold cake made with the leftover yolks. Proportions vary from book to book; something in the region of 1/2 cup butter, 1 1/2 cups sugar, 2 1/2 cups flour, 3/4 cup milk, baking powder and the whites of several eggs is typical of the type, but the book's own Silver Cake is the only authority here.
- Yolks versus whitesThe fragment's "2 egg yolks" contradicts the whole point of a silver cake. If your copy of the base recipe calls for whites, follow the whites; adding yolks will tint the crumb and change the structure.
- The walnutsChop them fine and toss them with a spoonful of the measured flour before folding in, or they sink. Toasting them for eight to ten minutes first sharpens the flavour, which matters in a cake this pale and mild.
- FlavouringAlmond extract of the period was frequently based on bitter almond and may have been stronger than what is sold today, though strengths varied. Since this variation swaps in vanilla anyway, a teaspoon of vanilla extract is a reasonable amount for a two-layer cake.
- OvenThe recipe gives no oven direction. If the base recipe calls for a moderate oven, about 350F is the usual modern equivalent; a loaf will take roughly 45 minutes and two 8-inch layers about 25 to 30, but judge by the cake.
- FoldingBeaten whites go in last, in two additions, folded rather than stirred. Adding the nuts before the whites keeps the batter from deflating while you distribute them.
- YieldIf the base is a full-sized silver cake it will make one 8- or 9-inch two-layer cake, perhaps 10 to 12 servings; the fragment printed here is too small to judge from. A boiled white icing or a plain butter frosting would suit it.
Lowney's Cook Book was published by the Walter M. Lowney Company, a Boston chocolate manufacturer, and belongs to a genre of promotional cookbooks that firms issued to put their product into home kitchens; its recipes are often written telegraphically, as variations on a handful of base batters. Silver cake and gold cake were commonly made as a pair, so that the whites went into one cake and the yolks into the other and nothing was wasted. English walnuts became cheap and widely available in America once California orchards came into production in the later nineteenth century.