Pound Cake
One pound of butter; one pound of sugar; one pound of flour; nine eggs; the grated rind of one lemon. Beat the sugar and butter to a light cream; add the yolks beaten light, the flavoring, then the whites beaten to a stiff froth, and lastly the flour. Bake slowly.
A true four-pound cake with no chemical leavening: every bit of lift comes from air beaten into the butter and the whites. The technique is the recipe.
- "Bake slowly"300-325F. At anything hotter the crust sets and colors long before a cake this dense and this deep is cooked through.
- Weigh, don't scoopA pound of butter is 4 sticks, a pound of granulated sugar about 2 1/4 cups, a pound of flour roughly 3 1/2 to 4 cups depending on how it is measured. Use a scale; the whole point of the formula is equal weights.
- Flour choiceHousehold flour of the period was generally softer and lower in protein than much modern all-purpose. Cake flour, or all-purpose with a couple of tablespoons per cup swapped for cornstarch, will give a texture closer to what the book seems to intend.
- Butter temperatureAround 65F, cool but pliable. Warmer and it will not hold the air that has to do all the leavening; the cake comes out heavy and greasy.
- EggsNine large eggs suits the formula. Separating them and whipping the whites is not optional here, since there is no baking powder.
- Fold, don't stirWhites first, flour last, both folded in with a light hand. Beating the flour in deflates the whites and develops gluten, which is what makes a pound cake tough.
- SaltThe recipe calls for no salt; butter of the period was commonly salted. With unsalted butter, about 3/4 teaspoon of salt added with the flour is a reasonable adjustment.
- Pans and timingThe batter fills a large tube pan or two 9-inch loaves. Expect 1 1/4 to 1 3/4 hours; done at 205-210F in the center. Cool in the pan 15 minutes before turning out, or it may break under its own weight.
- Yield and keepingAbout 20 to 24 slices. Well wrapped, it improves for two or three days and keeps well over a week.
The name is the recipe: a pound each of butter, sugar, flour and eggs, a formula easily carried in the head. Recipes under that name appear in eighteenth-century English cookery books, Hannah Glasse's among them, and the proportion crossed to America largely intact, where lemon rind, rosewater, brandy or mace served as the flavoring. Butterick, the dress-pattern firm, also published household manuals aimed at much the same readership that bought its patterns. Pound cake stood as the plain keeping cake against which the fancier layer cakes and their baking-powder shortcuts could be measured. That the recipe still assumes a cook who can beat whites to a stiff froth by hand, and judge a slow coal or gas oven without a thermometer, says a good deal about the kitchen it was written for.