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Pound Cake (Ten eggs one pound of sugar)
Ten eggs, one pound of sugar, one pound of butter, one pound of flour ; flavour with lemon ; beat the butter and sugar together, then add the yolks well beaten, after them the whites; beat to a stiff froth, then add flour. Half & pound of figs and same of almonds sliced makes it very nice.
A true pound cake: equal weights of butter, sugar and flour, with eggs as the only leavening. Everything depends on how much air you beat into it.
- The hinge is the beatingThere is no baking powder or soda here. The rise comes entirely from air whipped into the butter and sugar and from the stiffly beaten whites, so cream the butter and sugar until visibly pale and fluffy, at least five minutes with a mixer, and fold the whites and flour in gently rather than stirring them down.
- The pound measuresA pound each of butter, sugar and flour is 2 cups butter (4 sticks), about 2¼ cups granulated sugar, and roughly 3½ to 4 cups of modern all-purpose flour by volume. Weigh rather than measure by cup; the whole point of the formula is the balance of weights.
- Ten eggsEggs of the period are generally reckoned to have run somewhat smaller than today's large egg. Eight large eggs weigh roughly a pound in the shell; eight or nine may suit better than ten, which will make a wetter batter.
- Order of workYolks beaten well and added to the creamed butter, then the whites, then the flour. The printed punctuation is ambiguous as to whether the whites alone or the whole mixture is to be 'beaten to a stiff froth'; whipping the whites separately and adding them is the likelier reading.
- Flavour with lemonThe grated zest of one or two lemons, rubbed into the sugar before creaming, gives more flavour than extract. A little juice may be added, but sparingly: too much acid can make the creamed mixture separate.
- Figs and almondsHalf a pound each is generous. Snip the figs small, blanch and slice the almonds, and toss both in a spoonful of the measured flour so they do not sink to the bottom.
- Oven and tinThe recipe gives no oven direction; a moderate oven, around 325F, suits a cake this rich. Grease and line the tin. This quantity of batter is large for a single tube pan and may want dividing between three tins; go by the test rather than the clock — a skewer coming out clean and the cake pulling slightly from the sides.
- Yield and keepingThis is a very large cake, roughly 4½ lb of batter, giving 20 or more slices. Wrapped closely, it improves for two or three days and keeps a week or more.
The name is the recipe: a pound of each of the four principal ingredients, a formula easily carried in the head and easily scaled at a time when many kitchens had a balance and a set of weights but no standardised measuring cups. Versions appear in English cookery books from the eighteenth century onward and crossed to North America intact, where the enriched variants — figs, almonds, citron, currants, rosewater or brandy — multiplied. The Home Cook Book, compiled in Toronto in the 1870s from contributions by local women and sold in aid of charity, prints more than one pound cake, and the parenthetical in the title here serves to distinguish this version. The heavy egg count belongs to a tradition older than reliable chemical leavening: a good arm and a well-beaten white did the work that baking powder does now.