Maple Nut Cake
1/3 cup shortening 1 cup light brown sugar 2 eggs 1/2 cup milk 1 1/2 cups flour 1/4 teaspoon salt 2 teaspoons Royal Baking Powder 1 cup chopped nuts-preferably pecans 1 teaspoon vanilla extract Cream shortening, add sugar slowly and yolks of eggs and milk and beat well; sift flour, salt and baking powder together and add chopped nuts; fold in beaten whites of eggs; add flavoring. Bake in well greased loaf pan in moderate oven 35 to 45 minutes. Cover top with maple icing and sprinkle with chopped nuts while still soft.
A plain brown-sugar nut loaf that gets its name entirely from the icing. The method as printed skips a step, so read the batter order before you start.
- The missing instructionThe recipe never says to add the flour mixture to the creamed base; it only says to sift it and add the nuts. Since the milk has already gone in with the yolks, stir the flour-and-nut mixture into the creamed base, then fold in the beaten whites.
- Moderate ovenConventionally read as about 350-375F. At 35 to 45 minutes in a loaf pan that range is plausible; start testing at 35 with a skewer in the centre.
- ShorteningIn a book of this date the word covers any solid fat: vegetable shortening, lard, or butter. Butter tastes better, but the crumb will be slightly less tender and will brown faster.
- Loaf panNo size is given. The batter is small for a 9x5 tin, so expect a fairly shallow loaf; an 8x4 will give a better shape and may want the longer end of the timing.
- Nuts in the flourTossing the chopped pecans with the sifted dry ingredients is deliberate — the coating keeps them suspended rather than sinking to the bottom. Don't skip it by stirring them in at the end.
- Baking powderTwo teaspoons for 1 1/2 cups flour is a heavy hand by modern standards but not unreasonable for a book selling baking powder. Modern double-acting powder releases its gas differently from the single-acting cream-of-tartar type Royal sold and less is lost in mixing; 1 1/2 teaspoons will do.
- The maple icingNo formula is given here, presumably because one appears elsewhere in the book. A boiled maple icing, maple syrup or sugar cooked to the soft-ball stage and beaten, is one likely reading; a simple maple icing would also serve. Press the extra nuts in while the icing is still soft, as instructed.
- YieldOne loaf, roughly ten to twelve slices.
The New Royal Cook Book was published by the Royal Baking Powder Company, one of a long series of free or near-free promotional booklets that American chemical and milling firms distributed from the 1880s onward. Royal's powder was cream-of-tartar based and priced well above its alum-based competitors, and the company fought that price gap with advertising, lawsuits and cookbooks — the brand named in the recipes themselves, as it is in this one. The cake itself belongs to a family of plain loaf cakes that carried their identity in the frosting: the batter here is a generic brown-sugar nut cake, and only the maple icing makes it a maple nut cake. Maple sugar and syrup were a familiar northeastern sweetener that gained wider commercial distribution in the early twentieth century, and maple-flavoured icings and fudges were fashionable through the 1910s and 1920s. Pecans are specified as the preference.