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Pound Cake
1 pound sugar 1 pound butter 1 pound eggs (10 eggs, shelled) 1 pound Five Roses flour (4 cups).
Cream the butter and sugar together, then add beaten whites of eggs, after the yolks, ½ teaspoon soda in a tablespoon milk. Put 1 teaspoon cream of tartar in flour, also a little salt. Add lastly lemon essence. Bake 30 minutes in moderate oven.
A true pound cake in the old sense: equal weights of sugar, butter, eggs and flour. The instructions are terse and the quantities are large, so a few things need spelling out before you start.
- Scale of the batterFour pounds of ingredients makes roughly 4 lb of batter, enough for two large loaf pans or two 9-inch tube pans. Halving the recipe is sensible for a modern household. The stray "1 cup sugar, ⅔ cup butter" at the end does not match a halving of these quantities and is probably a fragment of an adjacent recipe.
- The 30 minutes is wrong for one panA cake this size cannot bake through in half an hour. Thirty minutes suits shallow layers or small individual tins; a full loaf or tube pan of pound cake needs 60 to 80 minutes at 325-350F. Test with a skewer rather than the clock.
- "Moderate oven"350F. For a dense, high-butter batter in a deep pan, 325F is safer against a scorched crust and a raw center.
- A pound of eggsTen eggs shelled came to about a pound when eggs ran smaller. With today's large eggs, weigh them: 1 lb of shelled egg is roughly 9 large eggs. Weight matters more than count in a recipe built on equal weights.
- Soda plus cream of tartarThis is homemade baking powder, mixed in the bowl rather than bought in a tin. Half a teaspoon of soda with one teaspoon cream of tartar is about equivalent to two teaspoons of modern double-acting baking powder. If you substitute, drop both the soda and the cream of tartar.
- Order of assemblyThe line reads awkwardly. As written, the whites go in after the yolks and before the flour. If you prefer, cream butter and sugar, beat in the yolks, then the soda dissolved in milk, then add the flour (sifted with cream of tartar and salt) alternately with the stiffly beaten whites, folding the whites in last to help keep a batter this heavy light.
- Lemon essenceLemon extract. About two teaspoons for the full batch; strength varies between brands, so add it to taste rather than pouring blind.
- Butter temperatureCool room temperature, around 65F. Warmer than that and a pound of butter will not hold the air you beat into it, which is the only lift this cake gets beyond the powder.
Pound cake takes its name from the formula rather than the flavor: a pound each of butter, sugar, eggs and flour, a ratio simple enough to carry by memory in kitchens where scales were more common than measuring cups. It is generally traced to British and northern European baking of the eighteenth century, and it traveled well because it kept well, being essentially preserved by its own fat and sugar. The version here shows the recipe caught mid-transition: the old weights are given first, then translated into cups for readers with a modern measuring set, and a pinch of chemical leavening has crept in where the original relied entirely on beaten eggs. The Five Roses Cook Book was published by a Canadian flour miller and assembled largely from recipes sent in by housewives who used the flour, which accounts for the compressed, note-to-self style of the directions.