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Cup Pound Cake
Two cups of flour, one and one-half cups of sugar, one cup of butter, one cup of eggs, one small quarter of a teaspoon of baking powder sifted in the flour, a little nutmeg. Beat with the hand the flour and butter to a cream, stir the eggs and sugar well together, then mix all nicely together and bake in a pan with a tube in it, or in patty pans. Splendid. :
A pound cake scaled down to cup measures, with the unusual instruction to cream the butter with the flour rather than the sugar. Follow that order — it is the closest thing this recipe has to a hinge.
- One cup of eggsEgg sizes varied, and some recipes of the period measured beaten egg by volume rather than counting. A cup is about 5 large eggs, or 8 fl oz / 240 ml of beaten egg. Crack into a measuring cup rather than counting.
- The mixing orderBeating butter into the flour first coats the flour with fat and limits gluten development, giving a fine, tight crumb — the same principle as modern reverse creaming. The butter must be properly soft, and the egg-sugar mixture should be whipped pale and thick, since it is doing nearly all the leavening.
- A quarter teaspoon of baking powderThis is deliberate, not a misprint. Classic pound cake rises on beaten eggs; the powder is insurance. Do not increase it or the cake will dome, crack and dry out.
- Oven temperatureThe recipe gives none; 325F suits a batter this rich. Expect roughly 55-70 minutes for a tube pan and 18-25 for patty pans, judging by a clean skewer rather than the clock. It will brown well before the centre is set -- tent with foil if the top darkens early.
- Patty pansSmall individual tins, often smaller and shallower than a modern muffin cup. Standard muffin tins are a workable substitute; fill two-thirds full.
- A pan with a tube in itAny tube or bundt pan of about 8-9 inches; this batter comes to around 5 cups, so choose a pan it will fill by at least half. The tube exists because a solid loaf of this density cooks unevenly in the middle. Butter and flour it thoroughly -- this batter sticks.
- NutmegGrate it fresh. A quarter teaspoon is about right; pre-ground nutmeg loses most of its aroma within months, and whole nutmegs with a grater were common kitchen kit in the nineteenth century.
- YieldRoughly 15-18 muffin-sized cakes, or one tube cake serving 10-12. It keeps well wrapped for several days and slices better on the second day.
Pound cake takes its name from the original formula — a pound each of flour, butter, sugar and eggs — which needed no written recipe at all, only a memory and a set of scales. "Cup" pound cake is the American translation of that idea into the volume measures that came to dominate household cooking here over the course of the nineteenth century, as tin cups were cheap and widely to hand, though genuinely standardised measuring vessels came late in the century. The proportions here are loosened from the strict pound-for-pound rule: rather more flour than butter, less sugar, and a whisper of baking powder, a chemical leavener that became more widely and reliably available in American kitchens from the 1860s onward. The single-word verdict at the end, "Splendid," is a sign-off of the kind often found in compiled community cookbooks, where contributors sometimes added a brief endorsement to their own recipes.