Beat 1 pound of butter with 1 pound of sugar to a cream. Add the yolks of 8 eggs well beaten. Sift 1 pound of flour with 2 teaspoonfuls of baking-powder and stir together with 1 cup of milk. Add the whites of eggs, beaten to a stiff froth with a pinch of salt. Flavor with rose-water. Bake in a moderate oven until done.
This is a pound cake in all but name — equal weights of butter, sugar and flour — with baking powder and separately whipped whites added to lighten it. The instructions assume a cook who knows what a finished cake looks like, so the practical work is in pan choice and judging doneness.
- Scale of the batterA pound each of butter, sugar and flour plus eight eggs and a cup of milk makes roughly 4 1/2 pounds of batter — far too much for one standard pan. Divide between two 9x5-inch loaf pans and a small extra pan, or use a large 10-inch tube pan plus one loaf. Halving the whole recipe is reasonable for a modern household.
- "A moderate oven"Conventionally read as about 350F, though period "moderate" covers roughly 325-375F. In loaf pans expect somewhere around 55-70 minutes; in a tube pan 60-80. Test with a skewer in the deepest part and look for the sides pulling away from the pan.
- Rose-waterNot a vanilla substitute in disguise — it was a standard cake flavouring through the nineteenth century. Use 1 to 2 teaspoons of culinary rose water; the concentrated food-grade extracts sold today are much stronger and should be added a few drops at a time.
- Butter and sugar "to a cream"With this much butter, creaming properly matters more than the baking powder does. Butter at about 65F, 5 to 8 minutes in a stand mixer, until visibly pale and increased in volume.
- Baking powderTwo teaspoons to a pound of flour (about 3 1/2 cups) is on the light side by modern standards, but the whipped whites do most of the lifting. Period baking powder was often single-acting, so the original cook worked fast; today's double-acting powder gives you more leeway.
- Folding the whitesThe batter is stiff and the whites are firm. Slacken the batter with a third of the whites stirred in without ceremony, then fold in the rest in two additions. Overworking here is the main way this cake turns dense.
- Yield and keepingAround 24 to 30 slices in total. High-butter cakes of this type improve on the second day and keep well wrapped for close to a week; they also freeze cleanly.
Cakes called "Spanish" in English and American cookbooks of this period rarely have much to do with Spain — the name is often taken to have signalled richness, a heavy hand with eggs, or a flavouring such as rose water, orange flower water or wine that struck the writer as southern, though this is inference about naming habits rather than documented practice. What this recipe actually is, is a pound cake, the eighteenth-century formula of a pound each of butter, sugar, flour and eggs, here modified in the way the late nineteenth century modified nearly everything: chemical baking powder joins the whipped egg whites, and a cup of milk loosens a batter that once relied on beating alone. Rose water places it in an older tradition still, since distilled flower waters were widely used as sweet flavourings in English baking long before vanilla extract became cheap and commonplace. Its appearance under a national label belongs to the conceit of the book itself, which assigned a country to each day of the year, and the geography is best read as decoration rather than documentation.