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English Walnut Cake
Two cups sugar; three-fourths cup of butter; three and one-half cups flour; six eggs, leaving out the whites of three for the frosting. Add one cup of milk to the creamed butter and sugar and eggs, three teaspoons of baking powder and one cup of chopped walnut meats.
Frosting-Stir sufficient sugar into the unbeaten whites of three eggs left from cake to make a frosting of the right consistency. Flavor with a teaspoon of lemon extract and spread on cake. When ready to crease, divide frosting into squares and place half an English walnut in center of each square.
The cake batter is a conventional turn-of-the-century butter cake, but the frosting is raw egg white stirred with sugar and never cooked or heated at any stage.
- Why the cautionThe frosting is raw egg white, stirred unbeaten with sugar and spread on the cake, so the whites are never brought to a temperature that would destroy Salmonella. Sugar alone does not pasteurize them. Use a current icing recipe instead.
- Reading the egg countSix eggs go into the kitchen, but only three whole eggs and three yolks go into the batter; the three reserved whites are the entire frosting. Cooks who use all six eggs in the cake will find themselves with nothing to frost it with and a slacker batter.
- OvenNo temperature is given anywhere in the recipe. A modern cook baking a butter cake of this size would use about 350F.
- Pans and yieldThe quantities make a large cake, though no pan, yield or baking time is given. The direction to crease the frosting into squares suggests a square or sheet cake rather than rounds. Baked as layers, allow roughly 30 to 35 minutes; in a tube pan, closer to an hour.
- English walnutThe common walnut, Juglans regia, as opposed to the American black walnut then still gathered wild in much of the country. Black walnuts are far stronger and oilier and will overwhelm the lemon; if you want the flavor the recipe intends, use ordinary supermarket walnuts.
- "When ready to crease"Creasing means scoring the still-soft frosting into serving squares with a knife, so the cake can later be cut along the marks without shattering the surface. The half walnuts go on before the icing sets.
- Method orderThe instruction is compressed and lists milk, baking powder and nuts together. A modern cook would cream butter and sugar, beat in the eggs, then add the milk with the flour and baking powder, adding the nuts last.
Butterick, the pattern company, published its cook book as part of a broad domestic-advice list aimed at the same middle-class housekeeper who bought its dress patterns, and the cake chapter reflects the ingredients that a housekeeper of the period could buy: chemical baking powder, refined white sugar, bottled lemon extract, and shelled walnuts sold by the pound. "English walnut" was the American trade name for the Persian walnut, the name generally traced to the nuts having long reached the United States on English ships; by the time this book appeared, large-scale California orchards had made them cheap and common, and nut cakes accordingly turn up all through the period's cake sections. The uncooked white-and-sugar frosting was a quick icing, distinct from the boiled icing that required a sugar thermometer or a practiced eye, and the trick of creasing it into squares and setting a walnut half in each made a plain loaf or layer look like a bakery cake.