Pound Cake
Yolks 10 eggs Whites 10 eggs 1 lb. flour ½ teaspoon mace 2 tablespoons brandy Cream the butter, add sugar gradually, and continue beat. ing; then add yolks of eggs beaten until thick and lemoncolored, whites of eggs beaten until stiff and dry, flour, mace, and brandy. Beat vigorously five minutes. Bake in a deep pan one and one-fourth hours in a slow oven; or if to be used for fancy ornamented cakes, bake thirty to thirtyfive minutes in a dripping-pan.
The ingredient list has been mangled in transcription — only the eggs, flour, mace and brandy survive — but the method and the title tell you the rest. This is Fannie Farmer's standard pound cake, built on equal weights.
- The missing quantitiesThe standard pound-cake proportion is 1 lb butter, 1 lb sugar, 1 lb flour and 10 eggs, which is what the surviving flour-and-egg line and the method (cream the butter, add sugar, then yolks) imply. The butter and sugar amounts have dropped out of the transcription; work from the equal-weight rule rather than guessing.
- Flour by weightOne pound of flour is roughly 3¼ to 3½ cups of modern all-purpose, depending on how it is measured. Weigh it; volume measurement in a cake this rich is where it goes wrong.
- A slow oven300 to 325F. At 1¼ hours in a deep pan that is right for a loaf of this density — the low heat is deliberate, since a hot oven sets the crust before the centre rises.
- Dripping-pan versionA dripping-pan is a shallow rectangular pan, so the 30-to-35-minute bake produces a thin sheet cake to be cut into shapes and iced. The recipe specifies no separate heat for it; the much shorter time suggests a hotter oven, around 350F, but that is an inference rather than the book's direction.
- Separated eggsThere is no chemical leavening here. The creaming, the whites beaten "stiff and dry" and the five minutes of vigorous beating are the entire lift. Note that the recipe itself directs that beating after the whites, flour, mace and brandy are all in, rather than a light final fold; get the cake into the oven promptly once mixed.
- MaceGround mace is the aril, the outer covering of the nutmeg seed -- sharper and less sweet than nutmeg itself. It is a characteristic flavouring of English pound cake; nutmeg substitutes at about the same quantity but tastes rounder.
- BrandyTwo tablespoons is flavouring, not liquid structure. Much of the alcohol cooks off in the long bake, and spirit is traditionally said to help such a cake keep.
- Yield and keepingThe full pound quantities make one very large loaf or two to three 9-inch loaves, twenty or more slices. Wrapped well it keeps for several days, and it slices far more cleanly cold than warm.
Pound cake takes its name from the recipe itself: a pound each of butter, sugar, flour and eggs, a formula easy to remember and easy to scale in a kitchen without reliable scales or printed cookbooks. It is documented in English cookery from the eighteenth century and reached American households long before chemical leavening did, which is part of why the eggs are separated and beaten so hard here — mechanical aeration was one way to lighten a batter this heavy, though by the late nineteenth century baking powder was widely available and beaten eggs had become a choice rather than a necessity. Fannie Farmer includes it as a foundation rather than a novelty: the same batter, baked thin in a dripping-pan, becomes the base for the iced and decorated "fancy cakes" that filled a period tea table, and the mace-and-brandy seasoning is often said to descend from the English original.