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Hickory-Nut Cake (Cup butter two of sugar three)
A cup butter, two of sugar, three of flour, one of sweet milk, whites of seven and yolks of two eggs, a tea-spoon soda, two of cream tartar, one pint hickory-nut meats rolled and sprinkled with flour; beat the whites to a stiff froth. Rich and excellent. - Mrs. A. B. Morey.
A late-nineteenth-century white cake built on the creaming method, with no oven temperature, no pan size and no baking time given — all assumed knowledge in a book written for cooks who had made a dozen cakes like it. The proportions are sound and translate directly.
- The measurementsCup measures of this period were not yet standardised, but reading them as the familiar 8-ounce cup works: 1 cup (about 8 oz / 225 g) butter, 2 cups sugar, 3 cups flour, 1 cup milk. The pint of nut meats is a volume measure — 2 cups chopped, roughly 7 to 8 oz.
- Soda and cream of tartarThis is baking powder made in the bowl — 1 teaspoon soda with 2 teaspoons cream of tartar is close in lift to about 3 to 4 teaspoons of modern double-acting powder. Because it is single-acting, it starts working the moment the milk goes in, so the batter must go into the pans and into the oven without delay.
- "Sweet milk"Simply fresh unsoured milk, specified because so many recipes of the period called for buttermilk or clabbered milk. Whole milk is the right substitute.
- The eggsSeven whites and two yolks gives a pale, fine-grained cake with the tenderness the yolks contribute. Five yolks are left over, and in a household kitchen they would likely have gone into a custard or a gold cake rather than been wasted.
- Hickory nutsShagbark hickory (Carya ovata), gathered wild and shelled by hand, a laborious job. Pecans, a close relative, are the usual substitute and behave much the same; "rolled" here means crushed or coarsely chopped, not ground.
- Flouring the nutsTossing the nut meats in flour before folding them in keeps them suspended rather than sinking to the bottom of a fairly loose batter. Take the flour from the measured 3 cups rather than adding extra.
- Method and ovenCream butter and sugar, beat in the yolks, add flour and milk alternately, fold in the floured nuts, then fold in the stiffly beaten whites last and lightly. The recipe gives no oven direction; 350°F is a reasonable modern setting.
- Pans, time and yieldThis is a large batter — enough, by modern reckoning, for two 9-inch layers plus a small loaf, or one 10-inch tube pan. Expect roughly 30 to 35 minutes for layers and 55 to 65 for a tube pan, serving about 12 to 16. None of this is in the original.
The Dixie Cook-Book belongs to the family of subscription-and-contributor compilations that dominated American home cooking in the 1880s, where each receipt carries the name of the woman who supplied it — Mrs. A. B. Morey here — and the collection doubles as a record of who cooked what in a community. The cake itself is a period type: a white or near-white butter cake leavened with soda and cream of tartar, which some home cooks are said to have kept as separate tins for a time after commercial baking powder appeared, and enriched with a nut that cost nothing but labour. Hickory nuts were gathered wild across the Ohio Valley and the upland South in autumn, cracked through the winter evenings, and never seriously commercialised because the shell is hard and the meat sits in awkward chambers, though they did reach city markets in season. The pecan, easier to shell and by then being planted in orchards, gradually displaced hickory in printed recipes over the following decades.