Home › Cake-Making › Citron Pound Cake
Citron Pound Cake
One pound sugar, one of flour, three-fourths pound butter, eight large or ten small eggs, one and a fourth pound citron finely shredded; cream butter and sugar, add the yolks, the nthe flour and well-whipped whites; put layer of batter in cake-pan and sprinkle thickly with citron, then another layer of batter, etc., till pan is filled. Bake slowly one and a half to two hours. - Mrs. J. M. Southard.
A true pound cake with no chemical leavening at all: everything depends on air beaten into the butter and the whipped whites. Weigh the ingredients rather than measuring by volume, since the whole structure is a ratio.
- The hinge: aerationThere is no baking powder or soda here, so the only lift comes from creaming and from the whites. Cream the butter and sugar until visibly pale and fluffy (5-8 minutes in a stand mixer), and fold the stiff whites in by hand in two or three additions so they are not knocked flat.
- "Bake slowly"The recipe gives no temperature, only the relative instruction; a reasonable modern equivalent is somewhere around 300-325F. A cake this dense and this large needs the long, low bake; at 350F the outside will set and darken well before the centre is done.
- Weights, not cupsOne pound sugar is about 2 1/4 cups granulated; one pound flour is about 3 1/2 cups all-purpose, though the original would have been a softer, lower-protein flour. Three-fourths pound butter is 3 sticks. Use a scale if you have one.
- The eggsEight large or ten small eggs comes to roughly a pound of egg in the shell, which is the classic pound-cake proportion. Eight modern US large eggs is close; if your eggs are small, use nine or ten.
- CitronThis is candied citron peel (Citrus medica), sold in tubs or blocks near the baking supplies at holiday time, not the citron melon and not lemon peel. A pound and a quarter is a great deal by modern taste, and half that amount gives a less assertive cake. Shred it fine and toss it in a spoonful of the measured flour so it does not slide to the bottom.
- Pan and layeringThe batter plus citron runs to about five pounds. Use a 10-inch tube pan, or divide between two 9x5 loaf pans, buttered and lined. The alternating batter-and-citron layering is deliberate: it keeps the heavy fruit suspended rather than sunk.
- Doneness and timingOne and a half to two hours suits a single large pan; loaves will be done nearer 70-80 minutes. A skewer in the centre should come out clean of batter, and the internal temperature should read about 205-210F.
- Yield and keepingA large tube cake serving 18-20 in thin slices. Like all pound cakes heavy with candied peel, it improves after a day or two wrapped tightly, and keeps a week or more at room temperature.
The name is a straightforward recipe: a pound of sugar, a pound of flour, a pound of butter and a pound of eggs, the proportions English cooks were writing down by the eighteenth century, when a formula you could remember mattered more than one you could look up. Mrs. Southard's version cuts the butter back to three-quarters of a pound and then loads in more candied citron than flour, which tells you what citron meant in an Ohio household in the 1870s: an imported luxury, bought by weight at the grocer's for holiday baking and used generously when a cake was meant to impress. Buckeye Cookery (first published in Marysville, Ohio, 1877) collected such recipes under contributors' names.