Mountain Cake
One pound sugar, one pound flour, one half pound butter, six eggs, beaten separately, one cup raisins, one cup sliced citron, one cup sweet milk, one cup blanched almonds or hickory nuts, two teaspoons baking powder; bake in pans with tubes in the centre.
A fruited pound cake built on the old rule of equal weights of sugar and flour, lightened with separated eggs and a little baking powder. The measurements are by weight, which makes it easier to scale than most cakes of this vintage.
- Weights into cupsOne pound sugar is about 2 1/4 cups granulated; one pound flour is roughly 3 1/2 cups, or 4 cups if you sift first and spoon it in. Half a pound of butter is two US sticks (8 oz). Weighing is faster and more reliable here.
- The hinge: eggs beaten separatelyCream butter and sugar, beat in the yolks, then alternate flour and milk, and fold the stiffly beaten whites in last. The batter is heavy with fruit and nuts, so the whites are the only real lift beyond the two teaspoons of baking powder — deflate them and the cake bakes dense.
- Pans with tubesA tube pan means a plain ring or angel-food pan, not a fluted Bundt with a nonstick coating. This is a large batter: divide it between two 9-inch tube pans, or use one 10-inch tube pan filled no more than two-thirds. Butter and flour it thoroughly.
- OvenNo temperature is given. Bake at 325°F, which suits a butter-heavy batter — 60 to 75 minutes for a large tube pan, 45 to 55 for two smaller ones. A skewer into the thickest part should come out clean, and the cake should have pulled slightly from the sides.
- CitronCandied citron, the thick peel of a citrus fruit grown for the rind, is still sold at holiday time and by mail. Candied orange or lemon peel substitutes without changing the character much; mixed candied fruit does, and not for the better.
- Hickory nutsHickory nuts could be gathered free across much of the eastern United States and turn up regularly in nineteenth-century American baking. Pecans are the closest supermarket stand-in; the blanched almonds the recipe offers first give a firmer, milder result.
- Fruit and flourToss the raisins, citron and nuts in a spoonful of the measured flour before folding them in. Otherwise they can sink and pack at the bottom of the ring.
- Sweet milkSimply means fresh unsoured milk, specified to distinguish it from the buttermilk or sour milk used with saleratus in other recipes of the era. Whole milk.
- Yield and keepingAround 20 servings. Like most pound cakes it improves after a day wrapped tightly, and it slices more cleanly cold.
Mountain cake belongs to a large family of nineteenth-century American cakes named for places, people, or nothing in particular — the name carried no fixed formula, and different books attach it to quite different batters. What is fixed is the underlying pound-cake arithmetic: a pound of sugar to a pound of flour, half a pound of butter, and eggs by the half-dozen, a scheme that predates reliable ovens and standardized cups and survived precisely because it could be remembered without a book. The baking powder is the modern touch here; commercial powders spread through American kitchens from the 1860s onward, and a spoonful or two turns up added to older creamed-butter cakes.