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Newport Pound Cake
Make same as New York Gingerbread, omitting ginger, and substituting one teaspoon vanilla extract.
This is a one-line variation, so everything depends on the recipe it points to. Find New York Gingerbread earlier in the Cake chapter and work from that, making only the two changes given here.
- Read the parent recipe firstNothing here stands alone: the fat, sugar, egg, flour, leavening and any molasses all come from the gingerbread, so check that recipe for what it actually contains. Omit the ginger entirely and stir the teaspoon of vanilla in with the liquid ingredients, not the flour.
- It is not a pound cake in the strict senseA true pound cake is equal weights of butter, sugar, eggs and flour, with no chemical leavening. This is the gingerbread batter with the spice taken out; the book does not explain why it carries the pound-cake name. If the parent recipe uses molasses, expect a dark, moist loaf rather than a pale one.
- Oven temperatureThe recipe gives no temperature. If the parent gingerbread calls for a moderate oven, around 350F is the usual modern reading. Molasses browns fast, so if the top is colouring well before the centre sets, tent it loosely with foil.
- Soda, not baking powderGingerbread batters of this period are raised with soda reacting against the acid in the molasses. Do not swap in baking powder measure for measure, and get the batter into the pan promptly once the soda is wet.
- Vanilla extract in 1896Extract then was often thinner and more variable than today's. A single teaspoon of good extract is enough against the molasses; imitation vanilla tends to read harsh in a dark batter.
- Pan and donenessBake in a greased and floured loaf pan or a shallow square tin. Judge by a skewer coming out clean and the cake pulling slightly from the sides rather than by a fixed time, since pan depth changes it by ten minutes either way.
- KeepingMolasses cakes improve on the second day. Cool completely, wrap well, and slice thin.
Nineteenth-century American cookbooks were full of cakes named for places -- Newport, Dover, Marlborough, Washington -- where the name signalled a house style or a resort table more than any documented origin, and the same title can carry quite different recipes from book to book. What makes this entry characteristic of Fannie Farmer is its economy: rather than reprint a full ingredient list, she treats the gingerbread as a base formula and shows the reader that a cake can be turned into another cake by subtraction and a single flavouring. That habit of building variations on a standard reflects the Boston Cooking School's teaching method, where pupils learned a small number of reliable proportions and then rang changes on them. Whether it also reflects any wider shift in the period's flavourings is harder to say from a recipe of this kind.