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Mock Pound Cake
1/2 pound pulverized sugar 1/4 pound butter 3 eggs 1/2 cup milk 1¾ cup flour 2 teaspoons baking powder Beat the butter and sugar to a cream; add the yolks of the eggs; then alternately the milk and the sifted flour and baking powder. Then beat the whites of the eggs very stiff and stir them into the mixture carefully. Pour into a greased pan and bake one hour in a moderate oven.
A plain butter cake built on weights rather than cups, with the sugar carrying twice the butter. A few conversions and one honest look at the bake time are all it needs.
- Pulverized sugarThis is finely ground granulated sugar, roughly what is now sold as caster or superfine sugar — not confectioners' sugar, which contains cornstarch. Half a pound is about 1 1/8 cups; ordinary granulated works if you cream it thoroughly.
- Butter by weightA quarter pound is 4 ounces, one standard American stick. Have it soft enough to take a fingerprint or the creaming stage will never lighten.
- Moderate ovenGenerally reckoned around 350F, though period usage of the term covered roughly 325 to 375F.
- One hour is a maximum, not a targetThe batter comes to close to two pounds; in an 8x4-inch loaf pan it should be done in 45 to 55 minutes, and in an 8-inch round or square sooner. Start testing with a skewer at the 30-minute mark.
- Pan and preparationNo pan size is given. An 8x4-inch loaf gives the tall, close crumb the name implies; grease and flour it, or line the base with parchment, since there is enough sugar here to stick.
- Folding the whitesFold with a spatula and stop while a few streaks remain; the recipe's direction to stir them in 'carefully' amounts to the same thing.
- Baking powderTwo teaspoons to 1 3/4 cups flour is about a teaspoon per cup, in line with modern practice. Measure level and get the cake into the oven promptly.
- YieldOne loaf, about 10 slices. It keeps three or four days wrapped.
Pound cake takes its name from its formula rather than its flavor: a pound each of butter, sugar, eggs and flour, beaten long enough that air alone raised it. "Mock" versions like this one cut the butter back — here to half the weight of the sugar — stretch the batter with milk, and make up the difference with chemical leavening, a trade that saved both expense and a great deal of arm work. Recipes of this kind multiplied after commercial baking powder became a pantry staple in the later nineteenth century. The result is lighter and drier than true pound cake, closer to what would later simply be called a plain or yellow cake.