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Old Hickory Cake
One cup sugar, half cup butter, three eggs beaten well together, level tea-spoon soda stirred in half cup sour milk, two small cups One cup sugar, half cup butter, three eggs beaten well together, flour; flavor with lemon, pour in small dripping-pan, bake half an hour, and cut in squares. This cake is always elected for a "second term.”—Miss Flora Ziegler, Columbus.
A plain sour-milk butter cake baked thin in a sheet and cut into squares. The typesetting in the original repeats a line; read it as one list of ingredients, not two.
- The doubled line"One cup sugar, half cup butter, three eggs beaten well together" appears twice through a compositor's error. Use those quantities once.
- Sour milkThis means naturally soured raw milk, which today's pasteurized milk will not reliably produce. Use cultured buttermilk, or stir about half a tablespoon of lemon juice or vinegar into half a cup of whole milk and let it stand ten minutes.
- SodaA level teaspoon of soda is the full leavening here, and it is a generous amount for half a cup of acid milk. Stir it into the sour milk as directed and get the batter into the pan promptly; the reaction is largely spent within a few minutes.
- "Two small cups flour"Nineteenth-century cup measures varied and "small" is not a defined unit. Take it as roughly two cups (about 9 oz / 250 g) of all-purpose flour.
- Dripping-panThe pan that caught fat under a roast, shallow and rectangular. A quarter-sheet pan or a 9x13 inch pan gives the same thin bake; the batter will be only about half an inch deep.
- OvenNo temperature is given. Bake at around 350F and start checking a thin sheet of this size at about twenty minutes; the recipe itself directs half an hour.
- Lemon flavoringA teaspoon of extract or the grated zest of one lemon suits this quantity of batter.
- YieldAbout sixteen to twenty squares from a 9x13 pan.
"Old Hickory" was Andrew Jackson's nickname, earned in the field and carried through two presidential terms, and Miss Ziegler's closing joke, that the cake "is always elected for a second term," is the whole point of the name. Political nicknames attached themselves freely to nineteenth-century baking, alongside Election Cake, Lafayette Gingerbread and Washington Pie, and a contributor might well have expected the reference to land without explanation. The cake itself is unremarkable and that is its virtue: sugar, butter, eggs, sour milk and soda made a sheet cake from what a household already had on hand, with no expensive spices or dried fruit. The Dixie Cook-Book, like the Buckeye books it grew from, was assembled largely from such signed contributions, with many recipes carrying the name and town of the woman who sent them in.