Walnut Cake
1¾ cups flour 2¾ teaspoons baking powder Whites 2 eggs ¾ cup walnut meat, broken in pieces Mix ingredients in order given. Bake forty-five minutes in a moderate oven. Cover with White Mountain Cream, crease in squares, and put one-half walnut on each square.
A plain white butter cake carrying broken walnuts, finished with a boiled marshmallow-style frosting. The printed measurements have lost their fraction marks, so read them with care before you begin.
- The fractions"134 cups flour" is 1¾ cups; "34 cup walnut meat" is ¾ cup. On the same pattern of lost fraction marks, "234 teaspoons" baking powder reads as 2¾ teaspoons.
- Missing ingredientsAs printed, the list gives no butter, sugar or liquid, none of which can be inferred safely; the lines appear to have dropped out. Consult a complete white cake formula before proceeding.
- "Mix ingredients in order given"The phrase generally implies the usual creaming sequence of the period: fat and sugar beaten pale, liquid and dry alternated, stiffly beaten egg whites folded in last. Folding rather than stirring matters, since the whites are the only lift beyond the baking powder.
- Moderate ovenConventionally taken as about 350°F today; the recipe itself gives no temperature. Forty-five minutes suits a single deep layer; shallower layers will need less.
- WalnutsToss the broken meats in a spoonful of the measured flour before folding them in, or they settle to the bottom. Toasting them briefly first sharpens the flavour, which is otherwise mild.
- White Mountain CreamThe book's boiled frosting — sugar syrup cooked to the thread stage and beaten into egg white. It sets firm enough to score, which is why the recipe tells you to crease it into squares and set a walnut half on each as a portion marker.
- YieldNot stated; a single layer would cut into roughly twelve to sixteen squares, depending on the pan.
Walnut cake belongs to the wave of nut cakes that filled American cookbooks from the 1880s onward, when shelled nuts became cheap and reliable through the grocery trade. The cake itself is the household white cake that runs through the whole cake chapter of this book with with citron, with chocolate he var. The instruof the frostion to crease theng into squares and mark each with half a walnut is a period habit worth noticing: it has often been read as a way of turning a plain layer into a tray of uniform servings, though that reading is interpretation rather than documented practice.