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Hickory Nut Cake
8 ounces of sugar. 8 ounces of butter. 8 ounces of whites of eggs (9 whites.) 1/2 cupful of milk. 1 rounded teaspoonful of baking powder. 1 pound of flour. 12 ounces of hickory nut kernels.
Don't beat the whites to a froth. Warm the butter and sugar together and rub them to a cream the usual way, then add the eggs, then milk, powder, and the flour. When well mixed stir in the hickory nuts. Flavorings may be added at option. If brandy be used the baking powder should be left out. There is one cake marked "presented by Mrs. A.' It rose one-sided. The top cracked all over, looked like all splits and gullies, and in the high side a crater opened and the lava kept rising and running and never would get cooked and stop, though all the rest of the cake was done hard long ago, and began to smell unpleasantly. That cake was poor, had too little butter and too much eggs, milk and flour, and probably was not put into bake for some hours after the batter was mixed. There is another "presented by Miss B." It rose and rose, flattopped and even, but never got above the edge of the cake mould. It leaked over the top and hung in strings, and fell on the stove bottom and made a smell, and when it got tired of that it just sunk down and down again. That had too much sugar.
A white pound-cake batter carrying its own weight in nuts, written for a bakeshop cook who was expected to know the rest. The second half of the entry is not instruction at all but a post-mortem on two failed cakes sent in by amateurs, and it tells you what the author cared about: ratio and promptness.
- Weigh, don't scoopThe sugar, butter, whites, flour and nuts are all given by weight, as in a professional shop; the milk and the baking powder are the exceptions, given by measure. A pound of flour is roughly 3 1/2 cups sifted, 8 ounces of butter is two sticks, and 8 ounces of whites is about 1 cup.
- The whites are not meringue"Don't beat the whites to a froth" is the hinge. They go in liquid, as the only egg in a creamed batter, and all the lift comes from the creamed butter and the baking powder. Whipping them would give you a different, lighter cake than the dense nut loaf intended.
- OvenNo temperature is given. A cake this heavy with nuts wants a moderate oven, 325-350F, for something like an hour to an hour and fifteen minutes in a loaf or tube pan.
- The batter will be stiffA pound of flour against half a cup of milk plus nine whites makes a very thick batter, closer to a heavy pound cake than anything pourable.
- Bake it at onceThe author blames one failure on batter that sat for hours before going in. Chemical leavening begins working on contact with the milk, so scale the pans and get it into the oven.
- Hickory nutsShagbark hickory kernels are still gathered but almost never sold shelled at retail; cracking them is slow work for a meagre yield. Pecans are the same genus and the standard substitute, and 12 ounces is about 3 cups.
- The brandy remarkThe reason for dropping the baking powder when brandy is used is not explained here, and omitting it will give you a solid, close-grained cake. If you want the lift, treat brandy as flavouring only, a tablespoon or two, and keep the leavening.
- YieldRoughly a 3 1/2 pound batter: one 10-inch tube pan or two 9x5 loaves. It keeps well wrapped, and like most butter-and-nut cakes it slices better on the second day.
Hickory nut cake belongs to the era when a baking ingredient could still be something you picked up off the ground. Shagbark and shellbark hickories are native across the eastern and midwestern United States, and their kernels, richer and more perfumed than pecans but maddening to extract from the shell, turn up in nineteenth-century American cake, candy and pie recipes in a way they no longer do commercially. What makes this entry unusual is its second half. The American Pastry Cook was a trade book aimed at working bakers, and here the author abandons the recipe to autopsy two cakes evidently submitted by readers or exhibitors, one that erupted and one that sank, diagnosing each by ratio: too little butter and too much egg, milk and flour in the first, too much sugar in the second. That diagnostic habit, reading a finished cake backwards to its formula, is the mark of a professional writing for professionals rather than a household compiler copying receipts.