Peanut Cakes
Whites of 5 eggs 1 cup sugar 1 tablespoon flour Ground peanuts Beat the eggs as stiff as possible; add the sugar and flour; then stir in enough peanuts to make a very stiff batter. Drop in small lumps on buttered tins and bake in a quick oven.
This is a meringue drop rather than a cake in any modern sense: five whites, sugar, a token spoonful of flour, and enough ground peanuts to stiffen the mass. It succeeds or fails on how far the whites are beaten and how closely the oven is watched.
- Ignore the last lineThe trailing "1 cup butter 1 cup sugar" appears to be the opening of the next recipe and does not belong to this one; butter has no place in a meringue batter, where fat will deflate the whites.
- "Quick oven"In books of this period a quick oven is usually reckoned at around 400-425F, though the term was never precise. That is hot for a sugar-and-egg-white drop, which will brown at the edges within a few minutes; a modern baker would do better nearer 325-350F for 15-20 minutes, letting them dry in the turned-off oven.
- Beat the whites properly"As stiff as possible" means firm, glossy peaks that hold when the beater is lifted. Add the sugar gradually once the whites are foamy, and beat until the mixture no longer feels gritty between the fingers, or the finished cakes will weep syrup.
- Ground peanutsUse roasted unsalted peanuts, skins rubbed off, pulsed to a coarse meal. Stop well short of peanut butter; once the oil breaks free it will deflate the whites. Roughly 1 1/2 to 2 cups, added by feel until the batter mounds on the spoon.
- The single tablespoon of flour is not a misprintIt is there only to bind and to keep the sugar from running, as a little flour sometimes does in macaroon-type batters. Resist the urge to increase it.
- Buttered tinsButter alone is unreliable with a high-sugar batter that grips as it cools. Parchment or a silicone mat lifts the cakes off cleanly, and they release more easily if allowed to cool a minute or two on the sheet first.
- Yield and keepingExpect 30 to 40 small cakes from five whites. Meringues pull moisture from the air and go leathery overnight; store them airtight the moment they are cold.
Peanut cakes of this kind are close kin to almond macaroons with the expensive nut swapped out. Ground almonds bound with beaten white and sugar had been standard confectioners' work in Europe for centuries, and American cooks of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries readily substituted the peanut, which by then was cheap and widely sold roasted. Southern peanut acreage did expand in the early twentieth century, and the boll weevil's damage to cotton is often credited with encouraging the shift, though the causes were mixed. Cake sections of such books often carry similar economies: coconut, hickory nut and peanut standing in for almond, with the technique left untouched. The recipe's brevity is characteristic of terse period cake formulas written for cooks who already knew the method.