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White Pound Cake
1 lb. Gold Medal flour 1 lb. sugar 3/4 lb. butter Whites of 16 eggs Flavor to taste In mixing, follow directions as given under Pound Cake No. 1.
A classic pound-cake formula scaled by weight, with whites only in place of whole eggs. The original assumes you have already read Pound Cake No. 1, which is where the method lives; what follows fills in the gaps a modern cook will hit.
- The weights in cups1 lb flour is roughly 3 1/2 to 3 3/4 cups scooped and levelled; 1 lb granulated sugar is about 2 1/4 cups; 3/4 lb butter is three sticks. Weighing is far more reliable here, since the whole point of a pound cake is the fixed ratio.
- Sixteen egg whitesBy volume that is about 2 cups, or roughly 1 lb of white. Measuring by weight or volume is safer than counting, since egg size varies.
- The hinge: air, not leaveningThere is no baking powder in the ingredient list, so the lift depends on creaming the butter and sugar until pale and light and on the beaten whites; the actual handling of the whites is set out in Pound Cake No. 1, not here. Overbeaten whites break down and the cake bakes dense.
- Oven temperatureThe recipe gives none; the method would have been in Pound Cake No. 1. For a cake of this size a slow to moderate oven, in the region of 300–325°F, is the usual modern practice, with something like 1 1/4 to 1 3/4 hours depending on pan depth.
- "Flavor to taste"Standard choices of the period were vanilla, rose water, almond extract, mace, or lemon. About 1 tablespoon of extract, or 1 teaspoon of ground mace, suits this quantity of batter.
- Pan and yieldThis is a very large batch — roughly 4 lb of batter. Divide between two loaf pans or a large tube pan, lined and buttered. Expect 20 to 24 servings.
- Yolks left overSixteen yolks is a substantial amount. Cookbooks of the period often printed a gold or yellow cake using yolks near a white cake; custard, mayonnaise and lemon curd are the practical modern uses.
- DonenessTrust a skewer and the sound rather than the clock. A finished pound cake pulls slightly from the pan sides and springs back when pressed; underbaked centers sink badly in a cake with no chemical leavening.
Pound cake takes its name from the original ratio — a pound each of flour, sugar, butter and eggs. This white version swaps whole eggs for whites alone, producing the pale crumb that late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American bakers called "white" or "silver" cake, often printed near a "gold" or "yellow" cake that used up the yolks. Flour-company cookbooks like this one were promotional literature: Gold Medal was the flagship brand of the Washburn-Crosby milling company of Minneapolis, and the recipes are written to demonstrate that a bag of their flour could carry a household through everything from bread to a company cake. The cross-reference to "Pound Cake No. 1" is typical of the genre — a reader was expected to work through the section rather than dip into a single page.