Pound Cake

History

Pound cake rests on one of the plainest formulas in baking: a pound each of butter, sugar, flour, and eggs, the equal weights that give the cake its name. Amelia Simmons's first version holds to that rule exactly — one pound of sugar, one pound of butter, one pound of flour, and one pound (or ten) eggs — scented with a gill of rose water and spices to taste, then watched closely through a slow oven. The eggs, weighed rather than counted, are a small reminder of how the whole recipe was built around the scale. With no chemical leavening called for, the cake's rise depended entirely on air beaten into the batter.

The formula was English before it was American. Hannah Glasse's The Art of Cookery of 1747 prints it plainly: a pound of butter beaten in an earthen pan with the hand, one way, until it is like a fine thick cream, then twelve eggs, a pound of flour, a pound of sugar, and a few caraways. Its staying power was partly practical — an equal-weight ratio is easy to remember and simple to scale up or down.

Simmons prints a second cake under the same name that quietly breaks the rule. This one works three-quarters of a pound of butter with a pound of good sugar until very white, whips ten egg whites to a foam before beating in the yolks, and binds the whole with a pound and a quarter of flour loosened with rose water and a little brandy. The separated, whipped whites and the unequal weights mark an early move toward the airier cakes to come — the name preserved, the balance let go.

What the pages do not keep is who baked these cakes or for what table. The record here is a set of proportions and a hot oven, and it is silent on the households that measured out four equal pounds and on why one cook chose to hold the ratio while another chose to break it. Two further claims an earlier version of this note carried — that the formula was invented in early-1700s Europe, and that its equal weights survived because much of the public could not read — we learned from popular reference and food-writing sources, and we were unable to locate the evidence they rest on.

Ingredients

• 1 pound sugar
• 1 pound butter
• 1 pound flour
• 1 pound or 10 eggs
• 1 gill rose water
• spices

Instructions

1. Combine one pound sugar, one pound butter, one pound flour, and one pound (about ten) eggs.
2. Add one gill rose water and spices to your taste.
3. Watch it well; bake in a slow oven fifteen minutes.