Pound Cake
2 cupfuls sugar 2 cupfuls Crisco 2 teaspoonfuls salt 12 eggs 4 cupfuls flour 1/2 teaspoonful powdered mace 3 tablespoonfuls brandy Cream Crisco and sugar thoroughly together, add yolks of eggs well beaten, fold in whites of eggs beaten to a stiff froth, add brandy, flour, salt and mace, and mix lightly and quickly. Turn into a papered cake pan and bake in a slow oven for one hour and twenty minutes.
Sufficient for one large cake.
A true pound cake in the old sense: no baking powder, no soda, and no liquid but brandy. All the lift comes from the eggs, so the folding and the low oven are the whole recipe.
- The hinge: air is the only leaveningThere is nothing chemical in this batter. Cream the fat and sugar until visibly pale and fluffy, and fold the stiff whites in with a spatula in three additions, stopping the moment the streaks vanish. Overmixing after the flour goes in gives a dense, tough loaf with no way to recover.
- "Slow oven"300 to 325F. At 1 hour 20 minutes a cake this size will only just be done, so start testing at 70 minutes with a skewer in the centre; expect to go longer if you use a deep pan.
- CriscoThis book was written to sell Crisco, and the shortening is used here in place of butter. Modern Crisco has been reformulated to cut trans fat but works as written. Equal weight unsalted butter gives far better flavour.
- SaltTwo teaspoons is high by current taste, and reflects unsalted shortening plus a very large batter. One to one and a half teaspoons is plenty.
- Twelve eggsRoughly 600 g of egg, about 2 1/2 cups shelled. Eggs of the period may have run somewhat smaller than today's large eggs, so weigh if you can and aim for 550-600 g total rather than counting shells.
- MaceThe dried aril that encloses the nutmeg seed, sold in pieces called blades, and a traditional spice for English pound cake. Ground mace loses its perfume fast; if yours has been open a year, grate a little nutmeg instead.
- "A papered cake pan"Line the pan with parchment on the bottom and sides, greased. This batter bakes long enough that an unlined pan will darken the crust badly. A 10-inch tube pan or two 9x5-inch loaf pans suit the volume.
- Yield and keeping"One large cake" here means roughly 4 lb of batter -- enough for 16 to 20 slices. Wrapped well, it improves over two or three days as the brandy and mace settle.
A Calendar of Dinners was written by Marion Harris Neil and published by Procter & Gamble to promote Crisco, which came on the market in 1911; recipe books of this kind were how the company persuaded cooks to give up butter and lard for a shelf-stable vegetable shortening, and the recipes call for it throughout. What makes this page interesting is that pound cake is the last dish that ought to be made with shortening: the name comes from the eighteenth-century English formula of a pound each of butter, sugar, eggs and flour, and the butter was the point. Neil keeps the old proportions almost exactly -- two cups fat to two cups sugar to four cups flour, with eggs by the dozen doing all the leavening -- along with the traditional mace and brandy, and simply substitutes the sponsor's product for the butter. The result is a good demonstration of how a very old cake recipe survives a change of fat, and of how thoroughly the branded cookbook shaped American baking in the 1910s.