Home › Recipes › A plain pound cake
A plain pound cake
Beat one pound of butter in an earthern pan until it is like a fine thick cream, then beat in nine whole eggs till quite light. Put in a glass of brandy, a little lemon peel, shred fine, then work in a pound and a quarter of flour; put it into the hoop or pan and bake it for an hour. A good plum cake is made the same with putting one pound and a half of clean washed currants and half a pound of candied lemon peel.
Beat the yolks of fifteen eggs for nearly half an hour, with a whisk, mix well with them ten ounces of fine sifted loaf sugar, put in half a pound of ground rice, a little orange water or brandy, and the rinds of two lemons grated, then add the whites of seven eggs well beaten, and stir the whole together for a quarter of an hour. Put them into a hoop and set them in a quick oven for half an hour when they will be properly done.
Two receipts sit here in sequence: a butter-based pound cake (with a plum cake variation) and, from "Beat the yolks of fifteen eggs" onward, a quite different ground-rice sponge. Treat them as separate bakes.
- The missing sugarAs printed, the pound cake lists butter, eggs, brandy, lemon peel and flour, but no sugar at all. Pound cake receipts of this period generally creamed a pound of sugar with the pound of butter; without any sugar the result is closer to a rich, dense bread than a cake.
- Creaming is the whole methodThere is no chemical leavening in either receipt. All the lift comes from air beaten into the butter and eggs, so the instruction to beat the butter "like a fine thick cream" and the eggs "till quite light" is the hinge. A stand mixer will do the work far faster than a wooden spoon in an earthenware pan.
- A hoopA baking hoop is a bottomless ring, of tinned iron or of wood, set on a lined baking sheet, serving much the purpose a springform does now. Use a 9-10 inch round tin, buttered and lined, for the pound cake; the rice sponge suits two 8-inch tins or one 9-inch.
- Oven heat"Quick oven" for the rice cake is usually read as about 400-425F, brisk enough for a half-hour bake of a light sponge. No heat is given for the pound cake; with a pound of butter and nine eggs, 325-350F for its hour is a reasonable modern reading, and it may well need longer than the stated hour in a deep tin.
- A glass of brandyAn unstandardised measure. In cake receipts of this era it generally means a wine glass, roughly 2 fluid ounces, or a quarter cup. Take that as the upper limit rather than a precise figure.
- Loaf sugar and ground riceLoaf sugar was cut from a cone and pounded, then sifted; use ordinary caster or superfine sugar. Ground rice is a coarsely milled rice flour, found in supermarkets and in South Asian groceries, and it gives the sponge its characteristically fine, slightly sandy crumb.
- Orange waterOrange flower water, distilled from bitter orange blossom, not orange juice or extract. It is potent; a teaspoon or two is enough for a cake of this size.
- Currants for the plum cakeDried Zante currants, not fresh red or black currants. "Clean washed" mattered when dried fruit arrived full of grit and stalks; modern packaged currants need only a rinse and a thorough drying, and tossing them in a little of the weighed flour keeps them from sinking.
- YieldThe pound cake gives a substantial cake and keeps well wrapped for several days. The rice sponge, which calls for fifteen yolks and seven whites, serves about twelve and is best eaten fresh.
Pound cake takes its name from its arithmetic: a pound each of butter, sugar, eggs and flour, a formula easy to remember and to scale. Recipes in this shape appear in English household manuals from the eighteenth century onward and travelled everywhere English cookery went. The plum cake variation is the same batter loaded with dried fruit and candied peel, "plum" being the old catch-all for raisins and currants rather than the fresh stone fruit, as it still is in plum pudding. The second receipt here belongs to a different family altogether: the ground-rice sponges and Savoy cakes, raised entirely on separately beaten yolks and whites, which were among the fashionable light cakes of the late Georgian table and demanded sustained arm work, half an hour on the yolks alone.