Pound Cake
2 cupfuls sugar 12 eggs 2 cupfuls Crisco 2 teaspoonfuls salt 4 cupfuls flour ½ teaspoonful powdered mace 3 tablespoonfuls brandy Cream Crisco and sugar thoroughly together, add yolks of eggs well beaten, fold in whites of eggs beaten to a stiff froth, add brandy, flour, salt and mace, and mix lightly and quickly. Turn into a papered cake pan and bake in a slow oven for one hour and twenty minutes. Sufficient for one large cake.
A true pound cake in the old proportion — no baking powder, no soda, and no liquid but three spoonfuls of brandy. Everything depends on the air you beat into the eggs and how gently you keep it.
- The hinge: no chemical leaveningThe only lift comes from the beaten yolks and the stiff whites. Fold the whites in with a spatula in three additions and stop the moment the flour disappears; overmixing here gives a dense, damp band at the bottom.
- "Slow oven"300–325°F. At 300°F a large cake of this size will often want longer than the stated hour and twenty minutes — start testing at 1:20 with a skewer in the centre and expect up to 1:45.
- Crisco quantities2 cupfuls was reckoned as the pound measure in the period, though shortening is lighter than butter: 2 cups weighs nearer 400 g on a scale. Modern Crisco and other vegetable shortenings have been reformulated but still cream in the same way; an equal weight of unsalted butter works and tastes better, though the crumb will be slightly less tender.
- The salt2 teaspoons reads high because shortening is unsalted and the book is selling shortening as a butter replacement. With butter, cut it to 1 teaspoon.
- Twelve eggsPeriod eggs are generally thought to have run smaller than today's large. Twelve large eggs is roughly 600 g shelled (nearer 680 g in the shell), so a modern dozen gives somewhat more egg than the original would have. Separate them cold, then let the whites come to room temperature before whipping.
- MaceGround mace is the aril of the nutmeg — warmer and less sharp than nutmeg itself. It goes stale quickly; if yours has been open a year, buy fresh or the cake will taste of nothing but egg.
- "A papered cake pan"Grease the pan and line the bottom and sides with parchment. This batter is about 2 kg and needs a 10-inch tube pan or two 9x5-inch loaf pans; a single round layer pan will overflow.
- Yield and keepingOne large cake, 16 to 20 slices. Cool fully in the pan before turning out, and wrap well — pound cake of this richness improves on the second and third day.
The Story of Crisco (1913) was published by Procter & Gamble to teach American cooks what to do with hydrogenated cottonseed oil, a product that had no culinary tradition behind it. The inclusion of a pound cake looks pointed, though the motive can only be inferred: the name is generally traced to the eighteenth-century English formula of a pound each of butter, sugar, eggs and flour, so it was the most butter-identified cake in the repertoire and therefore the best proof that the new shortening could stand in. The recipe here gestures at the old proportions (two cups of sugar, two of shortening, four of flour, a dozen eggs) and keeps the old flavourings — mace and brandy were the standard pairing for rich cakes well before vanilla extract became cheap and universal. The absence of any baking powder is not an oversight but the mark of an older method, in which twelve eggs beaten separately did all the work.