Hickory Nut Cake

The American black walnut’s quieter cousin — the hickory nut — produced sweet, rich, butterscotch-flavored kernels that required extraordinary effort to extract. Mountain children spent evenings cracking hickory nuts with rocks and picking out the tiny pieces of nutmeat. The resulting cake — dense, sweet, and deeply nutty — was made only in fall when fresh hickory nuts were available, making it a seasonal delicacy.

Ingredients

• 2 cups all-purpose flour
• 1 cup sugar
• 2 tsp baking powder
• ½ tsp salt

½ cup lard or butter, softened

• 2 eggs

¾ cup whole milk

• 1 tsp vanilla
• 1 cup hickory nut pieces (black walnuts or pecans are acceptable substitutes)

Directions

1. Preheat oven to 350°F. Grease two 8-inch round cake pans or one 9x13 pan.
2. Cream lard and sugar until light.
3. Beat in eggs one at a time. Add vanilla.

Mix flour, baking powder, and salt.

1. Alternately add flour mixture and milk to the creamed mixture, beginning and ending with flour.
2. Fold in hickory nut pieces.

Pour into prepared pans.

1. Bake 30–35 minutes (round layers) or 35–40 minutes (9x13) until a toothpick comes out clean.
2. Cool completely. Serve plain (no frosting was traditional for the lunch pail version) or with a simple brown sugar icing.

Notes

Hickory nuts have a sweeter, more delicate flavor than black walnuts. The shells are extraordinarily hard and require a hammer or flat rock to crack. Extracting the nutmeat from the shell chambers requires patience and a pick. The effort was worth it — no other nut grows wild in Appalachia with hickory’s sweetness and richness.