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Soft Pound Cake
One pound sugar, one pound flour, one-half pound butter, one even teaspoon soda, two teaspoons cream tartar, one cup sweet milk, five eggs, flavor with nutmeg or vanilla. I generally put currants or citron in one loaf. This makes two large loaves.
A late-nineteenth-century "soft" pound cake: the classic pound-for-pound formula loosened with milk, chemical leavening and half the usual butter. The instructions assume you already know the creaming method, so that is where to start.
- The hinge: cream the butter and sugar properlyNothing in the text tells you to, but the cake depends on it. Beat the softened butter with the sugar until pale and visibly aerated, five minutes or more, then add the eggs one at a time. The leavening here is a support act, not the lift.
- Weights into cupsOne pound sugar is about 2 cups; one pound flour is 3 1/2 to 4 cups sifted (weigh it if you can, at about 454 g); half a pound butter is 2 sticks. Flour of the period was often softer and lower in protein than modern all-purpose, so a cake flour or a mix of the two may give a closer crumb.
- Soda and cream of tartarThis is baking powder assembled in the bowl, in the standard one-to-two ratio. If you would rather use commercial powder, 4 teaspoons stands in for the pair. Whisk either version thoroughly into the flour, since undispersed soda leaves yellow bitter streaks.
- Sweet milkSimply fresh unsoured milk, a term period recipes used to distinguish it from sour milk or buttermilk, which would have reacted with the soda differently. Use whole milk.
- Oven temperature and timeNo oven is given. Bake at 325 to 350F; two large loaves take 55 to 70 minutes, and a skewer should come out clean with the centre reading about 205F. A large butter cake at 350F will often crack along the top, which is normal.
- PansTwo 9x5-inch loaf pans, greased and lined, or one large tube pan. The batter is heavy; fill no more than two-thirds.
- Currants and citronCandied citron is still sold around the winter holidays and by baking suppliers; chopped candied orange peel is a fair stand-in. Toss the fruit in a spoonful of the measured flour before folding it in so it does not sink to the bottom of the loaf.
- NutmegGrate it fresh, and use a scant half teaspoon for the full batch. Pre-ground nutmeg is much flatter, and this cake has little else to hide behind.
- Yield and keepingTwo loaves, roughly 20 to 24 slices. Wrapped well, the cake improves on the second day and keeps about five days at room temperature.
Pound cake takes its name from the original proportions, a pound each of butter, sugar, flour and eggs, a formula recorded in English cookery from the eighteenth century and often said to have been prized for being memorable enough to need no written recipe. What is called "soft" pound cake here is the nineteenth-century American revision: the butter cut to half a pound, milk added for a lighter crumb, and the air supplied partly by chemical leavening rather than entirely by an hour of beating by hand. The leavening is given as separate soda and cream of tartar rather than as baking powder, from the years when commercial baking powder and home-mixed leavening coexisted, and the aside about putting currants or citron in one loaf is the voice of a household baker making two cakes at once, one plain for the family and one dressed up for company.