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Pound Cake
Augusta Simmers.
One pound of flour, three-fourths of a pound butter, three-fourths of a pound sugar, eight eggs; flavour to taste. 1, 2, 3, 4 CAKE.
Augusta Simmers.
One cup of butter, two of sugar, three cups of flour, four eggs; add a little more flour, roll out very thin on sugar, cut any shape, and bake quickly.
Two recipes run together here: a true pound cake given by weight, and a "1, 2, 3, 4" formula that, despite the name, is handled as a rolled sugar cookie rather than a cake. Both rely entirely on eggs and creamed butter for lift, so the mixing does the work no baking powder is present to do.
- The pound cake in cupsOne pound of flour is about 3 1/2 cups spooned and levelled; three-quarters of a pound each of butter and sugar is 3 sticks (1 1/2 cups) and about 1 3/4 cups respectively. Eggs of the period may have run smaller than today's large eggs, in which case seven large eggs would be closer to the original weight.
- The hinge: aerationWith no chemical leavening, every bit of rise comes from air beaten into the butter and sugar and from the eggs. Cream the butter and sugar until visibly pale and fluffy, then add the eggs one at a time, beating until each is fully absorbed before the next, or the batter will break and the cake will be dense and greasy.
- Flour last, and gentlyFold the flour in by hand in three or four additions. Beating at speed once the flour is in develops gluten and gives a tough, tunnelled crumb.
- Baking the pound cakeThe original gives no oven or tin. This quantity fills two 9x5-inch loaf pans or a large tube pan. Bake at 325F for 60 to 75 minutes for loaves, testing with a skewer; the low temperature matters because a heavy butter batter this size will scorch outside before the centre sets.
- Flavouring"Flavour to taste" in a book of this date could mean rosewater, mace, nutmeg, lemon zest or brandy. Two teaspoons of extract, a tablespoon of zest, or a teaspoon of ground mace all suit the quantity.
- The 1, 2, 3, 4 recipe is a cookie"Roll out very thin on sugar, cut any shape" means a stiff dough, not a batter. The recipe itself directs "a little more flour"; add enough to make the dough rollable, and roll it on granulated sugar rather than flour so the surface crisps and sparkles.
- "Bake quickly"Quickly means a hot oven; something around 425F is a reasonable modern reading, though the book gives no temperature. Thin cut-outs need only 5 to 8 minutes; pull them when the edges just colour, as they firm as they cool.
- YieldThe pound cake gives two loaves, roughly 20 servings. The cookie dough makes several dozen thin 2-inch cut-outs, depending how thin it is rolled.
A pound cake is a ratio recipe rather than a proper recipe: a pound each of flour, butter, sugar and eggs, easy to remember and easy to scale in a kitchen without reliable measuring cups. This version has already begun trimming the formula, cutting the butter and sugar back to three-quarters of a pound against a full pound of flour, a lightening often said to be a common tendency in nineteenth-century cookbooks. The "1, 2, 3, 4" name is the same idea moved from weights to cups, a measure increasingly favoured by North American cooks, and it survives today as the standard four-egg layer cake formula. That Augusta Simmers uses it here for a rolled and cut sugar biscuit is a reminder that these numerical formulas were treated as flexible bases rather than fixed dishes. Both contributions come from the same hand, a typical feature of community cookbooks like The Home Cook Book, which were assembled from signed submissions by local women and sold to raise money for hospitals and churches.