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Imperial Cake
1/2 lb. butter 1/2 lb. sugar Yolks 5 eggs Whites 5 eggs Grated rind 1/2 lemon 2 teaspoons lemon juice 1/2 lb. raisins, seeded and cut in pieces 1/2 cup walnut meat, broken in pieces 1/2 lb. flour 1/4 teaspoon soda Mix same as Pound Cake, adding raisins dredged with flour, and nuts at the last.
A rich butter cake given in weights, with the method left to a cross-reference. The pound-cake procedure it points to means creaming butter and sugar at length, beating in the yolks, folding in the flour, and folding the stiffly beaten whites in last.
- The weights in cupsHalf a pound of butter is 2 sticks (225 g); half a pound of granulated sugar is a generous cup plus 2 tablespoons; half a pound of flour is about 1 3/4 cups, spooned and levelled. Weighing is more reliable here than measuring, since the batter has no added liquid to forgive a heavy cup of flour.
- The order that mattersThe whites go in last, folded rather than beaten. They are the only leavening of consequence in a cake this rich, so deflating them at the end costs you the crumb.
- The quarter teaspoon of sodaWith only 2 teaspoons of lemon juice as acid, the soda contributes very little lift and mostly softens the crumb and darkens it slightly. Modern baking powder is not a substitute at the same measure.
- Dredging the fruitTossing the cut raisins in a spoonful of the measured flour keeps them suspended rather than sunk. Take that flour from the half pound, do not add extra.
- OvenThe recipe gives no oven direction. A moderate oven, in the region of 325F, suits a cake this dense, which scorches at the edges before the centre sets if pushed higher.
- Pan and timingThe batter is bulky: two 9x5 inch loaves, or one large tube pan, lined and buttered. Reckon on something over an hour and a quarter; test with a skewer in the centre, and tent with foil if the top colours early.
- Yield and keepingAbout 12 to 16 slices. Like most pound cakes it improves after a day wrapped tightly, and it keeps a week at room temperature.
- Raisins"Seeded and cut" reflects muscatel-type raisins sold with seeds in. Ordinary seedless raisins need only a rough chop, or leave them whole.
Imperial cake belongs to the large family of nineteenth-century American pound cakes, built on the old equal-weight formula of butter, sugar, eggs and flour and then dressed up with fruit, nuts and citrus rind. Names like Imperial, Queen, Sultana and Ambrosia appear across cookbooks of the period attached to differing recipes rather than to any fixed formula, and a book that has already printed a plain pound cake may give its variants in shorthand, as here, with the method left as "mix same as Pound Cake." The lemon rind and juice are doing real work: grated citrus peel was a common perfume for a rich cake, and the small quantity of soda reflects the spread of chemical leavening into a cake that would otherwise depend on beaten eggs alone.