Pound Cake
14 or 15 ounces of sugar. 12 ounces of butter. 10 eggs. 1 pound of flour. Warm the butter and sugar together slightly and work them with a spoon till creamy and white. Add the eggs 2 at a time, and then the flour in 3 or 4 portions. Beating the batter after all the ingredients are in tends to make the cake fine grained. Pound cake should not be flavored. Pound cake, doubtless is so called, because it can be made with a pound of each of the ingredients. The 10 eggs weigh a pound. But so much butter makes it too rich to be good eating.
A true creamed pound cake with no chemical leavening: every bit of lift comes from air beaten into the butter and from the eggs. The method rewards patience and punishes a cold kitchen.
- The hinge: temperature of the butterThe recipe says only to warm the butter and sugar together "slightly." In modern terms that is best taken as butter soft enough to take a spoon but still opaque and holding shape. Melted or greasy butter will not hold air and the cake will be dense and heavy.
- Weights, not cupsThe recipe is written entirely by weight. Use a scale: 14 to 15 oz sugar, 12 oz butter, 1 lb flour. Converting to cups here introduces exactly the error the original avoids.
- The eggsTen eggs to the pound means roughly 1.6 oz each in the shell, smaller than a modern large egg and nearer a small or medium one. Weigh them: 1 lb of eggs in the shell, or about 14 oz cracked out, is the target. Have them at room temperature or the creamed butter will curdle when they go in.
- No leavening, no flavoringThere is no baking powder here and the author is firm that there should be no extract either. If you want vanilla or mace, that is a departure from the style, not a correction of it.
- FlourIf you want a finer crumb, cake flour, or all-purpose with 2 tablespoons per cup replaced by cornstarch, will give it. Add the flour in the three or four portions specified.
- "Beating the batter after all the ingredients are in"The author credits this final beating with making the cake fine grained. Note that once the flour is wetted, extended beating develops gluten and toughens the cake, so keep the final beating brief.
- Pan and ovenThe recipe gives no oven direction. The batter will fill two 9x5 inch loaf pans or a 10-inch tube pan, buttered and lined. In a modern oven, 325F works: loaves take roughly 65-80 minutes, a tube pan closer to 90; a skewer should come out clean and the top will crack.
- Yield and keepingAbout 3 1/2 to 3 3/4 lb of batter, serving 20 or more in thin slices. Pound cake improves after a day wrapped tight, and keeps a week at room temperature.
The name is exactly what the author says it is: a pound each of butter, sugar, eggs and flour, a formula recorded in English cookery books from the eighteenth century and carried into American kitchens more or less unchanged. What is interesting in this version is the author's willingness to break the formula: the butter is cut to twelve ounces and the sugar to fourteen or fifteen, on the plain ground that the classic proportion is "too rich to be good eating." The recipe also insists that pound cake go unflavored.