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Water Pound Cake
Two cupfuls of sugar, one cupful of butter creamed together, three well-beaten eggs, two-thirds of a cupful of water, three cupfuls flour, two teaspoonfuls of baking powder sifted in flour, vanilla, half teaspoonful, and a little nutmeg.
A plain butter cake in the pound-cake family, lightened with baking powder and thinned with water rather than milk. The original assumes you know what to do with the batter once it is mixed, so the gaps are all in the baking.
- Creaming is the hingeWith only three eggs and a modest amount of baking powder, most of the lift comes from air beaten into the butter and sugar. Cream them for a good five minutes until pale and visibly increased in volume, then add the eggs gradually so the mixture does not break.
- Order of mixingThe recipe lists ingredients rather than steps. Add the flour and water alternately, beginning and ending with flour, and stop as soon as the last streaks disappear; overworking the batter after the liquid goes in toughens the crumb.
- OvenBake at 350F, roughly what period cookbooks generally called a moderate oven. A loaf or tube pan of this size needs about 50 to 60 minutes, layers closer to 25 to 30.
- Pan and yieldThis is about a 3-cup-flour batter, enough for one large loaf, a 9-inch tube pan, or two 8-inch layers. Grease and flour the pan well.
- SaltNo salt is listed, which was common when butter was reliably salted. With modern unsalted butter add half a teaspoon of salt to the flour, or the cake tastes flat.
- Baking powderTwo teaspoons in three cups of flour is a light hand by current standards but correct for a cake this rich. Older single-acting powders began working the moment they were wet, so get the batter into the oven promptly rather than letting it stand.
- Water, not milkWater keeps the crumb pale and slightly firmer than milk would, and it was the cheaper and always-available option. Milk may be substituted cup for cup for a softer, more tender result.
- Nutmeg"A little nutmeg" means about a quarter teaspoon, freshly grated. Ground nutmeg fades in the jar, so use a little more if the jar is old and less if you grate it fresh.
The name is the point: this is pound cake with the dairy taken out. The classic formula, generally traced to eighteenth-century English and colonial kitchens, was a pound each of butter, sugar, eggs and flour, leavened by nothing but beaten air and baked for hours. By the end of the nineteenth century, chemical baking powder had made that labor optional, and cookbooks filled with lighter variations on the old ratio, distinguished by their liquid: milk pound cake, cream pound cake, water pound cake. Water cost nothing and kept, and a cake that needed no fresh milk could be made any day of the week.