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Pound Cake
1 lb. butter 1 lb. sugar Yolks 10 eggs Whites 10 eggs 1 lb. flour 1/2 teaspoon mace 2 tablespoons brandy Cream the butter, add sugar gradually, and continue beating; then add yolks of eggs beaten until thick and lemoncolored, whites of eggs beaten until stiff and dry, flour, mace, and brandy. Beat vigorously five minutes. Bake in a deep pan one and one-fourth hours in a slow oven; or if to be used for fancy ornamented cakes, bake thirty to thirty five minutes in a dripping-pan.
A true pound cake in the old sense: equal weights of butter, sugar, eggs and flour, leavened entirely by air beaten into the batter. Weigh everything if you can, since the whole structure depends on the ratio holding.
- The weights in cupsOne pound of butter is four sticks; one pound of granulated sugar is about 2 1/4 cups; one pound of all-purpose flour is roughly 3 1/2 to 4 cups, which is exactly why a scale is better here. Ten eggs of modern large size run closer to 1 1/4 lb in the shell; period eggs were smaller, and the recipe does not itself specify a weight for the eggs.
- "Slow oven"The recipe gives no temperature; the term is usually glossed as somewhere in the region of 300-325F. A cake this rich and this deep needs the long, gentle bake; at 350F the outside sets and colors well before the center is done.
- No baking powder is missingThere is no chemical leavening in this formula and none was intended. Lift comes from the creamed butter and the stiffly beaten whites, so undermixing the butter and sugar or deflating the whites gives a dense, greasy cake.
- Handling the whites"Stiff and dry" is period phrasing for firm peaks; taken literally to the point of graininess the whites will not fold in cleanly. Fold them in with the flour rather than beating them through, despite the instruction to beat five minutes.
- That five minutes of beatingThe direction was written for beating by hand, whether with a spoon, a whisk, or a hand beater. With a stand mixer, cream the butter and sugar four to five minutes on medium, beat in the yolks, then fold the whites and flour by hand.
- MaceMace is the outer covering of the nutmeg seed, warmer and less sharp than the nut itself. Ground mace loses its perfume quickly, so use a recent jar; grated nutmeg at half the quantity is the nearest substitute.
- Pans and timingThe batter fills a 10-inch tube pan or two large loaf pans generously; 1 1/4 hours is right for the deep pan, and a skewer should come out clean with the center reading about 205F. The dripping-pan version is a shallow sheet, cut into shapes once cool.
- YieldAbout four pounds of finished cake, enough for 20 to 24 slices. It keeps well wrapped for a week and slices more cleanly on the second day.
The name is a specification, not a description: a pound each of butter, sugar, eggs and flour, a formula recorded in English cookery books from the eighteenth century and easily memorized and scaled. The lift in this formula is mechanical, which is why so much of the instruction here is about beating and why the egg whites are handled separately -- though bakers of the period also had yeast for other rich cakes. Mace and brandy are a long-standing English flavoring pair for rich cakes, both of them holding up through a long slow bake in a way that more delicate flavorings do not. The direction to bake it thin in a dripping-pan for "fancy ornamented cakes" suits small iced and decorated cakes, for which a firm, close-grained batter that cuts without crumbling was exactly what was wanted.