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Hickory-Nut Cake (Two cups sugar one of milk)
Two cups sugar, one of milk, two-thirds cup butter, three of flour, three eggs, two tea-spoons baking-powder, a cup nut-kernels cut fine. Tried, and not found wanting.—Mrs. Judge West, Bellefontaine.
A plain butter cake in the ratio style of the period: everything is given by volume and nothing is said about method, pan or oven, because the cook was assumed to know. Here is what to fill in.
- MethodCream the butter and sugar until light, beat in the eggs one at a time, then add the flour sifted with the baking powder alternately with the milk. Fold the nuts in at the end.
- Oven350F is a reasonable modern setting for a cake of this size and richness. The recipe itself names no oven heat and gives no heat term to translate.
- Pan and timingThe batter fills two 9-inch round layers (25-30 minutes), a 9x13 (35-40 minutes), or a tube pan (50-60 minutes). Test with a straw or skewer in the centre.
- Hickory nutsShagbark hickory kernels are a wild-gathered nut, rarely sold and tedious to shell. Pecans are the closest relative and the usual stand-in; black walnuts give a stronger, more assertive version.
- Cut fine, not ground"Cut fine" means chopped small with a knife, not reduced to meal. Toss the pieces with a spoonful of the measured flour so they stay suspended rather than sinking.
- SaltThe recipe assumes salted butter and lists no salt. If you use unsalted, add half a teaspoon with the flour or the cake tastes flat.
- Flour and leaveningNineteenth-century Southern flour was soft winter wheat, lower in protein than modern all-purpose. Three cups of all-purpose, spooned and levelled, works; two teaspoons of baking powder is on the lean side by current practice, and going to two and a half gives a lighter crumb.
- FinishingUndressed, this is a keeping cake for slicing with coffee. As layers it takes a boiled white icing or a caramel frosting, both standard in this book's period.
Hickory nuts were free food across the middle South and the Ohio Valley, gathered in autumn from wild shagbark and shellbark trees and cracked out by the fireside through the winter, which is why they turn up so often in nineteenth-century American cake and candy receipts while barely appearing in commercial baking today: the shells are thick and irregular, and they have never been shelled economically at scale. The Dixie Cook-Book is a compilation built from contributed recipes, and this one carries its contributor's name and town in the usual way, along with a line of endorsement. Bellefontaine is in Ohio, a reminder that these "Dixie" collections drew on contributors well north of the South proper.