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Imperial Cake
I lb. (2 cups) butter I lb. (2 cups) sugar IO eggs 1¼ lbs. (5 cups) flour 3 ozs. (3 heaping tablespoonfuls) blanched and halved pistachio nuts 1/4 lb. (1/2 cup) preserved cherries 1 gill (1/2 cup) cream 2 teaspoonfuls baking powder 1 teaspoonful pistachio extract
This is a formula rather than a set of instructions: the book gives the weights and leaves the method to the cook, as period cake chapters often did. Everything below assumes the standard creamed pound-cake procedure the proportions imply.
- The hinge: it is a pound cakeA pound each of butter, sugar and eggs (10 eggs is roughly a pound) with a little extra flour means the leavening is mostly air beaten into the butter. Cream the butter and sugar until visibly pale and light, add the eggs one at a time so the batter never breaks, then fold in the flour and cream alternately. Rushing the creaming gives a dense, greasy cake no baking powder will rescue.
- Scale it downAs written this is about 5 lb of batter before the fruit and nuts, enough for two large tube pans or three loaf pans. Halving or quartering the recipe is entirely safe with these proportions.
- A gillHalf a cup, as the book helpfully glosses. Nineteenth-century American gills were four fluid ounces; British gills were five, which is why old texts disagree.
- Oven temperatureA rich butter cake of this size wants 325F, and a full-size one will take 1 1/4 to 1 3/4 hours. Higher heat sets and browns the crust long before the centre is done. Tent with foil if the top colours early.
- Baking in a casseroleIf the cake is baked in earthenware or glass rather than metal, note that such dishes bake more gently but conduct heat slowly. Butter and flour it well, fill no more than two-thirds, bake uncovered for cake, and add 10 to 15 minutes to any timing given for a metal pan. Cool in the dish for 20 minutes before turning out or it will tear.
- Preserved cherriesThese are candied or syrup-preserved cherries, closer to today's glace cherries than to the bright red cocktail sort. Rinse off heavy syrup, dry them, and toss both cherries and pistachios in a spoonful of the measured flour so they do not sink.
- Pistachio extractStill sold; commercial bottles are frequently almond-based and are sometimes coloured. A teaspoon of almond extract plus the nuts themselves gives a truer flavour if the modern bottle tastes synthetic.
- FlourFive cups to 1 1/4 lb works out to about 4 oz per cup, a lightly filled cup rather than a packed one. Weigh it at 20 oz rather than measuring by volume, and use a low-protein all-purpose or a cake-flour blend for the fine crumb the proportions suggest.
- ServingCuts into 24 to 30 slices from a full batch. It keeps a week wrapped closely, and improves after a day.
Imperial cake belongs to the family of grand pound cakes often found in the back pages of American cookbooks in the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, alongside Queen's cake, Sultana cake and the various "gold" and "silver" cakes. The names were aspirational rather than descriptive: an imposing title, a pound of butter, and something costly folded through the batter. Here the luxury is pistachios and preserved cherries, both imported and both expensive. Its appearance in a casserole cookery book may reflect a vogue of roughly the same period, when heatproof earthenware and borosilicate glass, which dates from about 1915, were promoted for everything a household might bake, cake included, on the argument that one handsome dish could go from oven to table and save washing up.