White Nut Cake
1/2 cup milk ½ teaspoon cream of tartar 2½ cups flour 3 teaspoons baking powder 1 cup walnut meat cut in pieces 3/4 cup butter 1½ cups sugar Whites 8 eggs Follow recipe for mixing butter cakes. This mixture makes two loaves. 1/4 cup butter ½ cup sugar
A standard creamed butter cake enriched with walnuts and lightened with egg whites only. The ingredient list as printed is muddled — it carries two leaveners and a stray pair of measurements at the end — so read the notes before you start.
- The leavening is contradictoryCream of tartar belongs with soda, not with baking powder, which already contains its own acid. Use the 3 teaspoons baking powder with the 2½ cups flour and disregard the cream of tartar.
- The trailing line is not part of the cake"1/4 cup butter, 1½ cup sugar" at the end is a fragment, almost certainly the opening of a frosting or a neighbouring recipe that ran together in the setting. It has no place in the batter.
- "Follow recipe for mixing butter cakes"Cream the butter, add the sugar gradually, then add the milk alternately with the sifted flour and baking powder, fold in the stiffly beaten whites last, and stir the nuts through with a little of the measured flour so they do not sink.
- Eight whitesThat is about one cup of egg white from modern large eggs. Beat them to soft, glossy peaks rather than dry and grainy, or the crumb will be coarse.
- OvenThe recipe gives no oven direction; a moderate oven, around 350F, is a reasonable modern equivalent. Two loaves in 8x4-inch pans take roughly 40 to 50 minutes; test with a skewer at 40.
- Walnut meatOne cup of pieces is about 4 ounces. Toasting them briefly and cooling before they go in improves the flavour considerably and is worth the extra step in a cake this plain.
- YieldTwo small loaves, twelve to sixteen slices in total.
White cakes — those built on egg whites alone, with the yolks saved for custards, curds or gold cake — were a fixture of American baking from the mid-nineteenth century onward, when reliable chemical leavening and cheap refined sugar made a pale, fine-grained crumb an achievable domestic goal rather than a confectioner's trick. The book teaches cake by method rather than by individual recipe, which is why this one simply says to follow the directions for mixing butter cakes: the reader was expected to have learned creaming, alternating wet and dry, and folding in whites once, then apply them across dozens of variations. Adding a cup of nuts was a common way of turning a plain white loaf into something for company; hickory nuts and black walnuts appear in the same role in regional books of the period.