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Hickory Nut Cake
One and one-quarter cupfuls of brown sugar, one-half cup of butter, one-half cup of sweet milk, two cupfuls of flour, two eggs, one teaspoonful of cream tartar, one-half teaspoonful of soda. One cupful of raisins, one cupful of nut meats chopped fine together.
A plain butter cake leavened with cream of tartar and soda, written in the shorthand of 1900: ingredients listed, method assumed. The order below is the one the book takes for granted.
- Method, since none is givenCream the butter with the brown sugar, beat in the eggs, then add the milk alternately with the flour that has been sifted with the cream of tartar and soda. Fold in the raisins and nuts last.
- Cream of tartar and sodaOne teaspoon cream of tartar plus half a teaspoon soda is the period equivalent of about two teaspoons of modern baking powder. If you substitute, sift it with the flour and skip both original leaveners; the acid is already accounted for in commercial powder.
- Sweet milkSimply fresh unsoured milk, as distinct from the buttermilk or clabber a cook might otherwise have on hand. Whole milk.
- Hickory nutsShagbark hickory is rarely sold shelled and is laborious to crack. Pecans are the closest relative in flavor and texture and are the usual stand-in; black walnuts give a sharper, more assertive result.
- "Chopped fine together"The raisins and nuts are chopped on the same board, so the nut pieces coat the sticky fruit; this is likely to help keep the raisins from clumping and sinking.
- FlourTurn-of-the-century soft winter-wheat flour was generally lower in protein than modern all-purpose. Sift and spoon it lightly into the cup rather than scooping.
- Oven and panThe recipe gives no oven direction; around 350F suits a cake of this kind. The batter is stiff and suits a loaf pan or an 8-inch square, roughly 45 to 55 minutes for a loaf, until a skewer comes out clean.
- YieldOne loaf or one 8-inch square, about ten slices. It keeps several days wrapped.
Hickory nuts were a free ingredient across much of the eastern and midwestern United States, gathered in autumn and cracked through the winter, and nut cakes of this kind appear frequently in the cake chapters of American household books of the period while being rare in English ones. The shagbark and shellbark hickories yield a sweet kernel close to the pecan in flavor, and their commercial scarcity is generally attributed to the shell rather than the tree: the nut resists mechanical cracking, so it never entered the grocery trade the way pecans and walnuts did. A recipe like this one also shows a transitional moment in leavening. Cream of tartar and soda measured separately was the older practice; packaged baking powder had been on sale for decades by 1900, yet separate leaveners went on being called for in printed recipes.