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Hickorynut Bread
1 egg. 1 cup sugar. 1 cup sweet milk. 1 teaspoon salt. 1 cup nuts. 4 1/2 cups flour. 4 level teaspoons baking powder.
Mix well and let stand twenty minutes in two pans nine inches long, four and three-quarter inches wide, three inches deep. This amount just fills these two pans. Grease pans and over top of loaves with melted butter; bake in moderate oven until done. (Use the one-half cup flour to knead in soft dough.) SALLY LUNN WITHOUT YEAST No. 2. 2 eggs. 1 scant cup sugar. 3 cups flour. 3 level teaspoons baking powder. 1 cup sweet milk. 2 tablespoons butter.
Cream butter, add sugar and cream; beat yolks of eggs and add to sugar and butter; sift flour with baking powder and stir in first mixture, alternating with milk; last fold in beaten whites. Make like cake, bake in flat pan and eat while hot with butter.
Two recipes have run together in the original printing: the hickory nut loaf ends at "until done," and Sally Lunn Without Yeast No. 2 is a separate item that follows. Treat them separately.
- The flour is the problemOne cup of milk to four cups of flour (with a further half cup for kneading) gives a very stiff dough, closer to a baking-powder biscuit dough than a batter bread. Either the original assumed a much softer result than the numbers allow, or a second cup of liquid has dropped out in typesetting. Add milk cautiously until the dough is soft but still handleable rather than trusting the figures as printed.
- Sweet milkSimply fresh unsoured whole milk, specified to distinguish it from the buttermilk or clabber that a period kitchen also had on hand. No substitution is needed.
- Moderate oven350F. Two loaves in pans of the stated size will need roughly 45 to 55 minutes; a skewer in the centre should come out clean and the internal temperature should reach about 200F.
- The pansNine by four and three-quarter by three inches is essentially a standard 9x5-inch loaf pan. Two of them, as the recipe says, take the whole batch.
- The twenty-minute restStanding lets the flour hydrate, which softens the crumb of a stiff dough. It is not a proof; there is no yeast, so do not extend it or the leavening will be spent before the loaf sees heat.
- Hickory nutsShagbark or shellbark hickory, sweet and close in flavour to pecan, but rarely sold shelled. Pecans are the standard stand-in; chop them coarsely, about 4 oz to the cup.
- FatThere is none in the dough itself, only melted butter brushed on the pans and the loaf tops. The bread will be lean and firm and is best sliced thin, buttered, and eaten the day it is baked.
- Sally Lunn No. 2The original gives no pan size, oven heat or time. A shallow square or round tin of around 8 or 9 inches, baked at about 350F, should take roughly 25 to 30 minutes. "Make like cake" is the instruction that matters: fold the beaten whites in at the end and stop as soon as they disappear.
Hickory nuts were a genuinely wild ingredient in American kitchens well into the twentieth century, gathered rather than bought, which is why the recipe names them so casually and gives no weight. Shagbark hickory grows across the eastern and midwestern United States, and its nuts were a common autumn windfall in farm households; they never became a commercial crop because the shells are hard and irregular and the kernels difficult to extract whole, which is largely why pecans, their easier cousins, took over the market. Both recipes here dispense with yeast entirely, and the second is titled to make that point. A "Sally Lunn" was traditionally a yeast-raised sweet bread, generally traced to eighteenth-century Bath in England, so a version raised chemically and mixed "like cake" shows how thoroughly the older name had been detached from the older method.