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Hickory-Nut Custard Cake
Cream one pound sugar and half pound butter; add five eggs beaten separately, one cup sweet milk, one pound flour, three teaspoons baking powder, flavor with lemon, and bake in jelly-pans. For custard, place one pint milk in a tin pail and set in boiling water; add a table-spoon of corn starch dissolved in a little milk, two eggs, one-half cup sugar, two cups chopped hickory-nut meats, well mixed together to the boiling milk; stir, and put between the layers of the cake, while both cake and custard are warm. This is excellent.
A large butter cake in three or four thin layers, filled with a warm nut custard. The weights are the old baker's pound measures, and the filling is the part that goes wrong.
- The weights, convertedOne pound sugar is about 2 1/4 cups granulated; half pound butter is 2 sticks (8 oz); one pound flour is roughly 4 cups, measured by spooning into the cup and levelling. Weigh if you can — scooping packed flour will add several ounces and dry the cake out.
- Eggs beaten separatelyThis means yolks beaten into the creamed butter and sugar, whites whipped to soft peaks and folded in last. The recipe's own order is eggs, then milk, then flour. The whites are the cake's only lift beyond the baking powder, so fold rather than stir.
- Jelly-pans and ovenJelly-cake pans are shallow 8- or 9-inch rounds. This batter should make three or four 9-inch layers; the recipe gives no temperature, so bake in a moderate oven, around 350F, for roughly 18-25 minutes, until the centre springs back.
- The custard is the hingeA tin pail set in boiling water is a double boiler. Keep it that way — the recipe says to add the eggs to boiling milk, but if the mixture actually boils with two whole eggs in it, it will curdle into sweet scrambled egg. Temper the eggs with a little hot milk first, then cook over the water bath, stirring, until it coats a spoon at around 175-180F.
- Flavouring"Flavor with lemon" means lemon extract, about 1 to 1 1/2 teaspoons, or the grated zest of a lemon for a cleaner taste.
- Hickory nutsShagbark hickory is a wild-gathered nut, rarely sold and tedious to shell. Pecans are a close relation within the same genus and the usual substitute; chop two cups of nutmeats medium before folding into the custard.
- Assembling warmSpreading warm custard on warm cake is deliberate — it soaks slightly into the crumb instead of sitting as a layer. It also means the cake will not hold neat slices until fully cooled, and once filled it should be refrigerated and eaten within two days.
- YieldA tall four-layer cake serving roughly 12 to 16. The custard goes between the layers only; the top is left plain, as the recipe directs.
The Dixie Cook-Book belongs to the family of 1880s American compilations built from contributed household receipts, and the layer-cake chapter is where that method shows most clearly — dozens of near-identical butter cakes, each distinguished only by its filling and its contributor's name for it. This one is distinguished by the hickory nut, which was never a market commodity in the way almonds or even pecans became. Shagbark and other Carya species grow through the eastern and southern United States, and the nuts were gathered in autumn, dried, and cracked at home through the winter, which is why they turn up in cakes, candies and puddings across nineteenth-century American cookbooks and almost never in English ones. The pecan is itself a hickory, and its commercial cultivation in the South from the later nineteenth century gradually displaced the wild nuts in recipes like this. The boiled cornstarch-and-egg filling reflects another change of the period: cornstarch had become a cheap grocery staple, and cooks used it to thicken custards that an earlier generation would have set with eggs alone.