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Hickory-nut Cake
Beat one-fourth pound of butter and one-half pound or so of sugar into a smooth cream, stir in the beaten yolks of three eggs, one saltspoonful of cinnamon and nutmeg mixed, and one saltspoonful of bicarbonate of soda dissolved in hot water, then add, and mix in, in small quantities, and alternately, the whites of three eggs whisked to a stiff froth, and one-half pound of flour, with one teaspoonful of cream of tartar mixed with it. Have prepared and dredged with flour one-fourth pound of stoned and chopped raisins and one-fourth pint of hickory-nut kernels, mix them quickly into the dough, and bake at once.
A creamed butter cake leavened with soda and cream of tartar rather than baking powder, written for a cook who knew her own oven. The weights convert cleanly; the omissions are the oven and the pan.
- The hinge: bake at onceSoda dissolved in hot water begins working the moment it meets the acidic cream of tartar in the flour. The batter will not wait while a pan is greased or an oven comes up to heat, so have both ready before the leavening goes in.
- Weights in cupsA quarter pound of butter is one stick (115 g); half a pound of sugar is a scant 1 1/4 cups; half a pound of flour is about 1 3/4 cups. Weighing is more reliable here, since the batter carries no milk or water and small errors in flour show up as dryness.
- SaltspoonfulA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon. So a quarter teaspoon of mixed cinnamon and nutmeg, and a quarter teaspoon of bicarbonate of soda, which with the teaspoon of cream of tartar gives roughly the lift of a modern teaspoon of baking powder, the soda being the limiting ingredient and the cream of tartar in excess of it.
- A quarter pint of nutsThat is half a cup, measured by volume rather than weight, of shelled kernels. Hickory-nut kernels are still sold by mail by a few small suppliers, mostly wild-gathered rather than orchard-grown; pecans are the closest relative and the usual substitute, with black walnuts giving a stronger, more resinous result.
- Oven and timeNo temperature, pan or time is given. As a modern starting point, a moderate oven of around 350F for roughly 45 to 55 minutes in a greased and floured 9x5-inch loaf pan, or about 35 minutes in a 9-inch round; test with a skewer, as timings will vary.
- Dredging the fruit and nutsTossing the raisins and kernels in flour before folding them in keeps them suspended rather than sinking. Use flour taken from the measured half pound rather than adding more.
- Folding, not stirringThe whites and flour go in alternately and in small amounts for a reason: the batter is stiff and heavy, and beating at this stage will knock the air out and toughen the crumb. Fold with a spatula until just combined.
- YieldOne loaf or one 9-inch layer, about ten slices. It keeps well wrapped for three or four days, and like most nut-and-raisin cakes it improves on the second day.
Hickory nuts were the great free nut of the eastern and midwestern United States, gathered from wild shagbark and shellbark trees in autumn and cracked through the winter. They were never much cultivated commercially because the shells are hard and irregular and the kernels awkward to extract whole, which is why hickory-nut cake, hickory-nut cookies and hickory-nut brittle are so common in nineteenth-century American cookbooks and so rare in modern ones. Its appearance in Oscar Tschirky's 1896 collection is a reminder that the Waldorf's celebrated maitre d'hotel gathered recipes well beyond the hotel's French menu, taking in plain American home baking alongside the terrapin and the canvasback duck. The pecan, which largely replaced hickory nuts in American baking once orchards were established in the South, is botanically a hickory itself, which is why it substitutes so neatly here.