Pound Cake
INGREDIENTS for larg cake.-1 lb. of butter. 1¼ lb. of flour, 1 lb. of pounded loaf sugar, 1 lb. of currants, 9 eggs, 2 oz. of candied peel, oz. of citron, 1/2 oz. of sweet almonds; when liked, a little pounded mace. AVERAGE COST, 3s. 6d.
Work the butter to a cream; dredge in the flour; add the sugar, currants, candied peel, which should be cut into neat slices, and the almonds, which should be blanched and chopped, and mix all these well together; whisk the eggs, and let them be thoroughly blended with the dry ingredients. Beat the cake well for 20 minutes, POUND CAKE. and put it into a round tin, lined at the bottom and sides with a strip of white buttered paper. Bake it from 1 to 2 hours and let the oven be well heated when the cake is first put in, as, if this is not the case, the currants will all sink to the bottom of it. To make this preparation light, the yolks and whites of the eggs should be beaten separately, and added separately to the other ingredients. A glass of wine is sometimes added to the mixture; but this is scarcely necessary, as the cake will be found quite rich enough without it.
TIME.-1 to 2 hours.
SEASONABLE at any time.
A true pound cake in the Victorian sense: equal weights of butter, flour, sugar and fruit, bound with whole eggs and no chemical raising at all. Everything depends on how much air you beat in.
- The proportionsThe name is very nearly the recipe: 1 lb. each of butter, sugar and currants, with 9 eggs (roughly 450 g of egg by modern sizes) to bind. The flour is 1¼ lb. rather than a flat pound, as the printed page gives it. Weigh rather than measure by cup.
- Separate the eggsThe note at the end is the hinge, not an afterthought. With no baking powder, the only lift comes from creamed butter and whipped egg; beat the yolks into the batter, then fold the stiff whites in last.
- Order of mixingModern practice reverses the book: cream butter and sugar together first until pale, then add yolks, then flour and fruit. Dredging flour into plain butter as written gives a heavier crumb.
- Pounded loaf sugarLoaf sugar was a hard refined cone broken and pounded fine. Use caster sugar.
- OvenBeeton gives no temperature, only the instruction that the oven be well heated when the cake goes in, so that the currants cannot sink. In a modern oven a hot start of roughly 400F for the first quarter of an hour, dropping to about 325F for the remainder, answers the same purpose. A cake this size will take nearer 2 hours than 1; test with a skewer.
- TinA 9 to 10 inch round deep tin, or two 8 inch tins. Line base and sides with buttered parchment; with this much butter and sugar the sides will colour long before the centre sets, so a double layer of paper is worth it.
- Candied peel and citronCitron is a thick-skinned candied peel, still sold in some baking shops; mixed candied peel substitutes for both. Cut it in slices rather than the small dice sold ready-chopped, as intended.
- Beating for 20 minutesThat timing assumes a wooden spoon and a strong arm. A stand mixer will get there considerably faster, in the region of 6 to 8 minutes on medium depending on the machine; over-beating after the flour goes in toughens the cake.
- YieldRoughly 5 lb of cake, 16 to 20 generous slices. It keeps well wrapped for a week and improves after a day.
Pound cake is the plainest possible cake formula and one of the oldest recorded in English, its name simply a memorandum of the weights: a pound of each principal thing. It is often said that this made it easy to repeat in a kitchen with no written recipe and only a beam balance, though that is inference rather than record. The French quatre-quarts preserves the same idea in four quarters. Beeton's version pushes it towards the rich fruit cakes of the Victorian tea table by adding a pound of currants, candied peel, citron and almonds, which is why she is so insistent about a hot oven at the start -- with no chemical raising to set the crumb quickly, heavy fruit in a slack batter simply migrates to the bottom. The optional glass of wine, which she dismisses as unnecessary, is generally traced to eighteenth-century practice, when sack or brandy went into most large cakes both for flavour and for keeping.