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Citron Pound Cake
One pound sugar, one of flour, three-fourths pound butter, eight large or ten small eggs, one and a fourth pound citron finely shredded; cream butter and sugar, add the yolks, the nthe flour and well-whipped whites; put layer of batter in cake-pan and sprinkle thickly with citron, then another layer of batter, etc., till pan is filled. Bake slowly one and a half to two hours. - Mrs. J. M. Southard.
A true pound cake in the old proportion — a pound each of sugar and flour, no chemical leavening at all — carrying more than its own weight in candied fruit. Everything depends on the eggs and the slow bake.
- The hinge: whipped whites are the only liftThere is no baking powder or soda here, so the beaten whites carry the whole crumb. Fold them in with a light hand at the very end and get the cake into the oven immediately; a deflated batter this heavy will bake into a dense band at the bottom.
- "Bake slowly" means 300-325F"Bake slowly" -- The book gives no oven temperatures; in modern terms a slow oven is generally taken to be somewhere around 300-325F, and that is an inference from the long bake and the weight of the batter rather than anything stated here. At one and a half to two hours, the top may want covering loosely with foil toward the end.
- Weights in modern termsA pound of sugar is about 2 1/4 cups; a pound of flour is roughly 3 1/2 cups sifted, though weighing is far safer here. Three-quarters pound butter is 3 sticks, or 1 1/2 cups.
- EggsEight large or ten small reflects a period when eggs ran smaller and were sold ungraded. Eight modern large eggs, separated, is the right reading.
- CitronThis is candied citron melon (or candied citron peel), sold in tubs at holiday time and otherwise scarce. One and a quarter pounds is a great deal by modern taste; two-thirds of that is plenty, and candied lemon or orange peel substitutes acceptably. Toss the shreds in a spoonful of the measured flour so they do not sink through the layers.
- Pan and liningThe batter fills a 10-inch tube pan or two 9x5-inch loaf pans. Butter and line with parchment — a two-hour bake on a sugar-and-fruit-heavy batter will stick to bare metal.
- CreamingCream the butter and sugar considerably longer than seems necessary, five to eight minutes with a mixer, until visibly pale and aerated. With no leavening, the air beaten in at this stage is the second half of the cake's structure.
- Doneness and yieldA skewer in the center should come out clean of batter, though it may pick up melted citron. The full recipe gives about 24 servings and, like most heavy fruited pound cakes, slices better on the second day.
Pound cake takes its name from the plain arithmetic of its oldest form — a pound each of butter, sugar, flour and eggs — a formula that could be carried in the head and needed no scales beyond a market weight. In The Dixie Cook Book, compiled in the 1880s, the butter is reduced, as here, and the plain cake is dressed up with candied fruit. Citron in this context is not the lemon-like citrus fruit but the candied rind of the citron melon, a hard-fleshed relative of the watermelon grown specifically for preserving; it was a standard American pantry item for holiday baking well into the twentieth century and appears constantly in nineteenth-century fruitcakes, black cakes and wedding cakes. The layering method — batter, a thick scatter of citron, more batter — was a common way to keep heavy fruit suspended, and the attribution to Mrs. J. M. Southard is typical of these community-compiled Southern books, which gathered recipes under contributors' names as a kind of local credential.