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Hickory-Nut Cakes
One egg, half cup flour, a cup sugar, a cup nuts sliced fine; drop on buttered tins one tea-spoonful in a place, two inches apart. Or, roll and bake like sand tarts. - Mrs. Lamb, Bellefontaine,
A four-ingredient drop cookie of the kind that fills nineteenth-century confectionery chapters: no oven temperature, no time, no yield. Everything hinges on how finely the nuts are cut and how small the drops are.
- Oven and timeNo temperature or time is given at all. A moderate oven in the region of 350F is a reasonable modern starting point; small teaspoon drops should be set and lightly browned at the edges in roughly 10 to 12 minutes. They firm as they cool, so pull them while the centers still look soft.
- The hinge: keep them smallWith a cup of sugar to half a cup of flour and a single egg, this is closer to a nut meringue than a cookie dough. It spreads. A rounded teaspoon and two inches of clearance, exactly as written, is not conservative advice.
- Hickory nutsShagbark is the likeliest hickory behind a recipe like this, and hickory nuts are rarely sold shelled; the shells are hard and the meats come out in small pieces. Pecans are the closest substitute in flavor and belong to the same botanical genus. "Sliced fine" means cut with a knife, not ground to meal, so the pieces stay visible.
- Egg sizeEgg size was unstandardised in this period and may well have been smaller than a modern large egg. If the mixture looks slack rather than thick and sticky, add a spoonful more flour rather than more nuts.
- "Roll and bake like sand tarts"Sand tarts are a rolled, thin, crisp sugar cookie, usually chilled before rolling and often brushed with egg white and dusted with sugar and cinnamon. To take this option, add flour until the mixture is a stiff dough and chill it well; the recipe as given is too loose to roll.
- Buttered tinsHigh-sugar batters weld themselves to metal. Parchment gives a better result than butter alone, and lets you lift the whole sheet off to cool before the cookies set hard on the pan.
The Dixie Cook-Book belongs to the compiled-and-credited tradition: each receipt carries a contributor's name and town, and this one comes from Bellefontaine, in Logan County, Ohio, which says a good deal about how loosely "Dixie" was applied to what were largely reprinted and pooled Midwestern household collections of the 1880s. Hickory nuts themselves were a genuinely regional ingredient rather than a purchased one -- shagbark hickories grow wild across the eastern and central states, and the nuts were gathered in autumn and cracked at home through the winter, which is why they turn up in cake, candy and cookie recipes in this period and almost never in modern ones. The comparison to sand tarts assumes the reader already knows that cookie, a thin rolled sugar wafer generally traced to Pennsylvania German baking and widespread in American books by this date.