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Strawberry Cakes
2 pounds flour. 1 pound loaf sugar. 1 pound butter. 6 eggs. Mace and a little wine to flavor. Bake quickly.--Mrs. A. T.
A pound-cake-family dough with no strawberries in it and no leavening — the proportions point to a stiff rolled cookie or small tea cake rather than a layer cake. The recipe assumes a cook who knows what to do with four ingredients, so the working notes matter more than the list.
- Weights, in cups2 lb flour is about 7 cups, 1 lb sugar about 2 1/4 cups, 1 lb butter is four sticks. This makes an enormous batch, easily six dozen small cakes; halving or quartering it is sensible.
- Loaf sugarSugar came as a hard cone to be broken up and pounded, and the pounded product was fine white sugar. Granulated is the direct substitute; superfine dissolves faster into the creamed butter.
- "Bake quickly"That means a hot oven; a period "quick" oven is usually read as roughly 400–425F, though the book gives no temperature. At those proportions and no chemical leavening, thin rolled cakes need only 6–10 minutes; watch for pale gold edges, since the high butter content browns fast.
- No leavening is deliberateThere is no saleratus, soda or baking powder here. Lift comes from creaming the butter and sugar thoroughly and beating the eggs well, which is the whole technique — rush it and you get hardtack.
- Flavourings, in quantityFor the full 2 lb of flour, roughly 2 teaspoons ground mace and 2–3 tablespoons of sherry or Madeira. Mace is the outer sheath of nutmeg and is milder and more floral; nutmeg is a passable stand-in at slightly less.
- Handling the doughIt will be short and crumbly. Chill it before rolling, work it about 1/4 inch thick, and cut with a plain or fluted cutter — the dough will not tolerate much re-rolling before it toughens.
- Flour then and nowNineteenth-century Southern soft wheat flour was lower in protein than modern all-purpose. A blend of all-purpose and pastry flour, or all-purpose with a couple of tablespoons per cup replaced by cornstarch, gets closer to the intended tenderness.
- Where the strawberries goNone are baked in. If the name refers to serving, sandwich pairs of the baked cakes with strawberry preserve, or serve them plain alongside berries and cream.
Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1878), compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree from contributions by Virginia housewives — hence the terse "Mrs. A. T." — is full of receipts like this one: a list of weights, a flavouring, and a two-word instruction, written by one experienced cook for another. The proportions belong to the pound cake family, an English inheritance that arrived in the colonies and stayed; mace and a spoonful of wine as the flavouring for sweet baking is likewise an eighteenth-century English habit. What the name means is not stated and is worth flagging as guesswork: names like this were commonly attached either to the cutter's shape, to the preserve the cakes were served with, or to a family association, and the book offers no clue which applies here.