Shellbark Cake
1/4 pound butter. 1 cup sugar. 2 eggs. 2 cups flour. 1/2 teaspoon soda. 3/4 cup milk. 1 cup shellbark meats 1/4 pound raisins 1/4 pound currants 1/4 pound citron 1 teaspoon vanilla Ten gratings of nutmeg, Beat the butter_and sugar to a cream; add the beaten eggs, then half the flour alternately with the milk in which the soda has been dissolved; add the nuts, then the fruit, well washed and drained and mixed with some of the flour; add vanilla and nutmeg and the remaining flour. Bake in a moderate oven,
A fruited butter cake built on hickory nuts, from the era when nut meats were gathered rather than bought. The method is standard creaming, but the printed text gives quantities only for the nuts, fruit and flavourings, so the batter proportions have to come from elsewhere.
- Missing batter quantitiesButter, sugar, eggs, flour, milk and soda are all called for in the method but no amounts appear in the ingredient list as printed. Use a familiar creamed fruitcake base scaled to roughly a pound of fruit and nuts.
- Shellbark meatsShellbark is the shagbark or kingnut hickory, Carya ovata and C. laciniosa. The nuts are rarely sold; pecans are the closest supermarket substitute in flavour and fat, though hickory is sharper and more resinous.
- Moderate ovenConventionally read as about 350F. A dense fruited loaf at that heat will want about an hour to an hour and a quarter; test with a skewer at the centre rather than by the clock.
- Soda dissolved in the milkSoda alone needs an acid, and the recipe as printed specifies neither. If you want the soda to do anything, use sour milk or buttermilk.
- CitronCandied citron peel, sold in blocks or diced at holiday baking counters. A quarter pound is 4 oz; chop it small, since large pieces sink.
- Flouring the fruitThe instruction to mix the drained fruit with some of the flour is the hinge of the recipe. It keeps raisins and currants suspended instead of settling into a solid band at the bottom.
- Ten gratings of nutmegOn a fine grater that is roughly a quarter teaspoon of freshly grated nutmeg. Whole nutmeg is worth using here; the pre-ground kind fades against the fruit.
Shellbark hickory nuts were a free autumn crop across Pennsylvania and the Middle Atlantic, gathered by the bushel and cracked through the winter, which is why they turn up so freely in regional cake and candy recipes while going almost unmentioned in English cookery. The shells are thick and the meats come out in small fragments, so a cup of picked nut meats represented real labour. Cakes like this one sit at the modest end of the fruitcake family: a creamed butter batter carrying three-quarters of a pound of raisins, currants and citron, without the brandy of a grand Christmas cake. The recipe reflects a Pennsylvania pantry, where the nut was local and the citron was the one expensive import.