Nut Cakes

Nut cake is quite probably a type of treat that has origins going all the way back to medieval times as this is no American-only tradition, but American pioneers certainly brought it with them and claimed it in their own way.

We forget how much a treat was a treat in the days when you might have a limited amount of sugar. Nuts were also a treat in and of themselves. They were harvested in the fall and time-consumingly cracked, the nut meats carefully extracted and lovingly stored to show up on the holiday tables at Thanksgiving and Christmas and on other special occasions through the year. Your average pioneer wasn’t buying nuts - they were using what was available to them where they lived.

In West Virginia, that meant black walnuts. In other areas, the nut cake might have meant English walnuts or pecans because that was what was available where they lived. And traditional old-time nut cake is just that - a simple nut cake made with what is available to you.