Nut Cake
½ cup butter or shortening
2 teaspoons baking-powder
1 cup sugar
¾ cup milk
2 cups flour
1 cup chopped nut-meats
4 egg-whites
Cream butter or shortening and add the sugar. Mix and sift the dry ingredients and add alternately with the milk. Add nutmeats, well floured, and fold in the egg-whites. Bake in a square loaf pan at 380° F., and frost the top when cool, using any desired icing.
A plain white butter cake carrying a cup of nuts, written in the shorthand of a period when the reader was assumed to know what "fold in the egg-whites" implied. Two things the text leaves unsaid will decide whether it works.
- Beat the whites firstThe recipe says only "fold in the egg-whites," but they should be beaten to firm, glossy peaks before folding — they supply much of the lift, alongside the baking powder and the air worked in by creaming. Fold in thirds with a spatula and stop while a few streaks remain.
- Flouring the nuts is not optionalToss the chopped nutmeats with a tablespoon of the measured flour before adding. The coating keeps them suspended rather than settling into a layer at the bottom of the pan.
- The oven temperature380°F is the recipe's own figure, from a period when oven thermostats and thermometers were coming into use in home kitchens; on a modern dial set 375°F. Bake until a tester comes out clean, roughly 35 to 45 minutes.
- Pan sizeA "square loaf pan" of the period is close to an 8-inch square, about 2 inches deep. Grease and flour it, or line the base with parchment.
- Butter or shorteningBoth work, but shortening gives a whiter, softer crumb, which is the point of a white cake. Butter gives more flavor and a slightly denser texture. Either should be at room temperature so it creams properly with the sugar.
- Which nutsHousehold books of this date often meant hickory nuts, black walnuts, or English walnuts, which were frequently cracked at home. Pecans or walnuts are the closest supermarket equivalents; toast them briefly to compensate for the flavor lost in modern storage.
- The leftover yolksFour yolks are left over. Yolks from a white cake were commonly put to use in custard, salad dressing, or a gold cake.
- YieldAn 8-inch square gives nine generous or sixteen small squares. Frost only after the cake is fully cool, as directed — a boiled white icing or a simple confectioners' sugar glaze both suit it.
Cakes built on egg whites alone were a distinct category in American baking from the mid-nineteenth century onward, sold under names like white cake, silver cake, and — when the discarded yolks went into a companion loaf — one half of a gold-and-silver pair. The technique depended on two nineteenth-century developments: reliable chemical leavening, which by the time this book appeared meant canned baking powder rather than the older saleratus-and-sour-milk method, and cheap refined white sugar and flour, which made pale, fine-grained cake achievable in an ordinary kitchen. The nuts point to domestic supply: hickory and black walnuts were gathered in the fall and cracked through the winter, and a nut cake was a common way to use them. The recipe's brevity assumes a reader who already knows how a butter cake is assembled.