Pound Cake
1 pound flour + cup wine 1/4 cup brandy few gratings nutmeg add flour. When well blended, add yolks of eggs beaten until thick, then sugar with nutmeg, whites of eggs beaten until stiff, and wine and brandy. Bake in loaves or small cakes.
The text as printed here is badly garbled — the ingredient column has collapsed into the method, and the butter, sugar and eggs have lost their quantities. What survives is enough to identify it as a standard pound cake with wine and brandy, and the classic proportions fill the gaps.
- The missing quantitiesA pound cake of this era means one pound each of flour, butter, sugar and eggs — about 3 1/2 cups flour, 2 cups butter, 2 1/4 cups sugar, and 9 to 10 large eggs. Only the flour, wine, brandy and nutmeg survived the typesetting here.
- The order that is legibleThe intended sequence appears to be the standard one: cream the butter (never named in the surviving text, but implied by "when well blended"), work in the flour, then the beaten yolks, then the sugar and nutmeg, then the stiff whites, and lastly the wine and brandy, which the printed text does place at the end.
- A gill and a cupCups -- "Cup" in an American book of this date is the 8-ounce cup. The brandy is clearly 1/4 cup; the wine measure has not survived legibly, and a half-cup is a reasonable reconstruction rather than a reading of the page. On that assumption, roughly 3/4 cup of liquid against a pound of flour is on the wet side but not unusual for a wine-scented pound cake.
- No leavening, and none neededThere is no baking powder in the formula. All the lift comes from thoroughly creamed butter and separately beaten whites, which makes the creaming stage the hinge: work it well past the point it looks done, until the butter is pale and visibly aerated.
- WineUnqualified "wine" in cake recipes of this period often meant a fortified wine such as sherry or Madeira rather than table wine. A medium sherry is a sensible choice.
- Oven and timePound cake wants a slow to moderate oven, 300 to 325F. A full loaf from a pound of flour takes 1 1/4 to 1 1/2 hours; small cakes in muffin tins, 20 to 25 minutes. Test with a skewer at the centre.
- YieldThe full quantity is large by modern standards — two 9-inch loaf pans, or about 30 small cakes. Halving it is sensible unless you are feeding a crowd.
- NutmegGrate it fresh. The recipe calls for it twice, which is likely an artifact of the garbling; a teaspoon or so suits this quantity of batter, rather less than a whole nutmeg yields.
Pound cake takes its name from the proportions rather than from any place or person: a pound each of flour, butter, sugar and eggs, a formula easy to remember and easy to scale in a kitchen without reliable measuring vessels. It travelled to America from Britain in the eighteenth century and stayed in the repertoire long after chemical leavening had made lighter cakes possible, on the strength of its dense, keeping texture. The wine and brandy here are typical of the older style, where spirits served as flavouring, though the often-repeated claim that they also acted as a preservative is not well documented. Its appearance in a Lowney's book is slightly incidental ocoa, and its cook books were promotional, but they were assembled as general household collections, so the standards of the American cake shelf appear alongside the chocolate recipes that were the point of the exercise.