Nut Cakes
Meat from 1 lb. pecans 1 lb. powdered sugar 1/4 cup flour Whites 6 eggs 1 teaspoon vanilla Pound nut meat and mix with sugar and flour. Beat whites of eggs until stiff, add first mixture and vanilla. Drop from tip of tablespoon (allowing one spoonful for each cake) on a tin sheet covered with buttered paper. Bake twenty minutes in a moderate oven.
A meringue-and-nut drop cake, closer to a macaroon than to a layer cake. Two things need saying before anything else: the last line of the text is not part of this recipe, and the nuts must be ground dry, not to a paste.
- The stray final line"1/4 cup butter 1 cup sugar 1/2 cup milk 123 cups flour" appears to belong to an adjacent recipe on the printed page and has bled into this one; "123" is presumably a mangled fraction. Ignore it entirely — this batter contains no butter, milk, or additional flour.
- Pounding the pecansThe original means a mortar, which crushes rather than smears. In a food processor, pulse the pecans with a few tablespoons of the measured sugar in short bursts until they are a coarse meal; run it continuously and you get oily pecan butter, which will slacken the meringue.
- Powdered sugarAt the time this was written, powdered sugar generally meant sugar ground fine at home or bought as such, not necessarily the cornstarch-blended confectioners' sugar of today. Modern 10x works and gives a slightly softer cake; superfine (caster) sugar is closer to the original.
- Moderate oven350F. At that heat 20 minutes is right for tablespoon-sized mounds — they should be set, faintly golden at the edges, and still slightly chewy in the middle. Lower to 325F if they are browning before they set.
- Buttered paper on a tin sheetParchment on a heavy baking sheet, no butter needed. These are high-sugar and stick fiercely to bare metal; let them cool a minute or two on the sheet before lifting or they tear.
- Folding, not stirringBeat the whites to stiff peaks, then fold the nut-sugar-flour mixture in with a spatula in three additions. The batter will deflate somewhat — that is expected — but stirring it down completely gives flat, hard wafers.
- YieldA pound of pecans and a pound of sugar make a large batch: roughly four dozen or more cakes from a level tablespoon each. Halve the recipe comfortably.
- StorageNaturally gluten-light and eggless of yolk, they keep three or four days in a tin but go soft in humid weather. Crisp them briefly in a 300F oven if needed.
Nut cakes of this kind — ground nuts, sugar, and beaten whites, with barely enough flour to bind — are often traced to the European almond macaroon, and American cookbooks of the late nineteenth century are said to have sometimes swapped in the native pecan, which around that time was moving from a gathered wild nut to an orchard crop in Texas and Louisiana. A batter of this sort belongs to the group raised by whites alone, which is why it needs no leavening and no fat. The instruction to pound the meats is a reminder of the era's equipment: a mortar and pestle was standard kitchen kit, and the slow, bruising action it produced is exactly what keeps nut meal dry enough to fold into meringue.