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Pound Cake
Wash well one pound of butter, dry in a towel, place in a slightly warmed bowl and work and beat with a spoon until thoroughly creamed. Add gradually one pound of sugar and cream again. Separate ten eggs, beating the yolks until thick and the whites until stiff and dry. Add the yolks to the butter and sugar, then gradually one pound of pastry flour well dried and sifted. Beat hard and long, add the beaten whites, one-quarter of a teaspoonful of salt, one-quarter of a teaspoonful of nutmeg or mace and the juice of half of a lemon. Beat well again, turn into loaf tins lined with buttered paper and bake in a moderate oven.
A true pound cake in the old proportion: a pound each of butter, sugar and flour, with ten eggs doing all the lifting. Nothing here is chemically leavened, so the beating is the recipe.
- The hinge: air, not baking powderEvery bit of rise comes from air beaten into the butter and the whipped whites. Cream the butter and sugar until visibly pale and fluffy, fold the whites in gently at the end, and do not "beat well again" so hard that you knock them flat.
- Washing the butterNineteenth-century butter was often salted heavily and carried buttermilk that turned it rancid. Kneading it in cold water and drying it in a towel removed both. Modern unsalted butter needs none of this; simply bring it to about 65F so it creams without melting.
- Drying the flourFlour was stored in sacks and cellars and genuinely held damp, so it was warmed and dried before use. Skip it. Do keep the sifting: pastry flour, around 8-9% protein, gives the tender crumb intended. Failing that, replacing two tablespoons per cup of all-purpose flour with cornstarch gives an approximation, though it lands closer to cake flour.
- A moderate oven325-350F. Given the size of these loaves, the lower end is safer — a hot oven sets and browns the crust before a four-pound batter cooks through.
- Tins and timingThe batter fills roughly three 9x5 inch loaf pans. Expect 60-75 minutes at 325F; a skewer should come out clean and the centre should read about 205-210F. Buttered paper means parchment cut to line the pan.
- Nutmeg, mace and lemonMace is the outer covering of the same seed as nutmeg, warmer and less sharp; either works. The lemon juice is for flavour only, and half a lemon in this quantity of batter is subtle — grated zest carries further if you want the citrus to read.
- YieldAbout four pounds of batter, or 30 to 36 slices. Pound cake keeps well wrapped for several days and improves on the second day as the crumb settles.
The name is a straight recipe in itself: a pound of butter, a pound of sugar, a pound of flour and a pound of eggs, a formula recorded in English cookery books from the early eighteenth century and still surviving in the French quatre-quarts, "four quarters." It endured because it needed no measuring cups, no chemical leavening and no thermometer; a strong arm could make it anywhere. By the time this book appeared, chemical leavening was available to American cooks, and a recipe that still relied wholly on beaten eggs was a deliberately old-fashioned one, a cake of quality rather than convenience. The instruction to wash the butter is the clearest date stamp: it belongs to an era when butter came from a farm or a grocer's tub rather than a wrapped print.