Nana’s Pound Cake

I was not endowed with one of those proverbial grandmothers who can cook. Mine was never one, in the words of Pappy O’Daniel, “to fry up some flapjacks or bake a mess of biscuits,” or a mess of anything except a mess. Unless, of course, those flapjacks or biscuits happened to come packaged or in an easy, just-add-water mix. She is devoted to anything canned, boxed, frozen, or otherwise a civilian MRE. Growing up, little was ever made from scratch, and what was, alas, was rarely very good.

Raised on a poor Minnesota farm in the 1940s, Grandma married a sailor—my grandfather—in Norfolk, Virginia while still a teenager. She’d left home without exposure to food more varied than cornmeal mush and bread spread with lard (“Mush (cornmeal)”). Her enduring childhood food-memory is eating roast cow’s heart and, learning the truth of it, vomited it in the fields whence it had recently mooed.  So much was her experience colored by food that was of necessity and not necessarily pleasure, that her idea of seasoning is salt and occasionally pepper. Chinese “stir-fries” encompass of her sense of adventurous eating.

Once in Virginia and eventually Richmond, she was taken under the wings of a coven of 1950s Virginia housewives. Many of these women were living when I was growing up, and those I recall were proficient cooks, yet none of them apparently taught my grandmother. Somewhat surprising. In another sense, it isn’t surprising at all. My grandparents were married in 1955, the same year green bean casserole was conceived—or aborted, given your perspective—(Greenberg) and the first McDonald’s franchise opened (Grundhauser). TV dinners were just introduced, and people bought millions of them (“Who”). The same decade when Danny Zucko, feeling peckish, ordered “a double Polar burger with everything” and “a cherry soda with chocolate ice cream,” to slake his thirst; “I’m not very hungry.” Indeed, for their 60^th anniversary, the grandparents treated themselves to cheeseburgers and shakes at their local McCarthy-era-esque purveyor.

1955 “coffee” for people who don’t like coffee! Like my grandparents. They drink it still.

If the other, generally older, wives shepherding my grandmother didn’t teach her to cook, they did pass along recipes. Grandma still has the standard issue basket, overflowing and fluttering with recipe cards and clippings, to prove it. One of these, the exception to all of the above, is her pound cake. It’s perfect in every way. That’s a bit much, but it really is sturdily stupendous, and the standard by which I judge every other pound cake. It’s the only thing I’ve ever known my grandmother to make (not open) and she’s made it as long as I can remember. Each Christmas she dusts off the mixer and the margarine to make three or four, posting several to family in Minnesota, freezing the others. Any occasion calling for something really good and crowd-pleasing produced one these dense dainties, fresh or freshly thawed.

The MSS in question.

It’s a curious recipe, written in my grandmother’s hand on crinkled and stained notebook paper, undated, of course, and headed “Betty’s Pound Cake.” None of my grandmother’s friends are named Betty, and getting a straight answer out of her about anything, least of all a full and complete citation for a decades old recipe, is a fairly impossible feat. Poking around for the original or similar recipes, I did find “Betty’s Pound Cake” in a 2000 book of recipes by Eleana Filer, “Tried & True”: Recipes from Eleana’s Kitchen (Filer 74). 

Betty‘s Pound Cake

1 c. butter, softened

1/2 c. Crisco

3 c. sugar

5 eggs

2 Tbsp. water (boiling)

3 c. flour

1/2 tsp. salt

1 Tbsp. vanilla-butternut flavoring

1 c. Carnation milk

Grease and flour Bundt pan. In large mixing bowl, cream the butter, Crisco, and sugar. Add eggs one at a time and mix well. Add the two tablespoons boiling water and continue beating. Add the evaporated milk. Beat in flour and salt, mixing well after each addition of flour. Pour into prepared Bundt pan. Start in cold oven at 325 and bake for 65 to 75 minutes until cake tester comes out clean. Do not over cook! Makes 12 servings.

It’s remarkably like my grandmother’s, calling for the same amounts of butter , shortening, sugar, eggs, flour, and salt, and both bake at 325°F.  But Filer’s also calls for 2 tablespoons boiling water, a full tablespoon of vanilla (my grandmother’s uses a combination of almond, lemon, and vanilla; 1 3/4 teaspoons totaled), and uses evaporated milk in place of fresh, same amount, though. Filer’s contains no raising agent—traditional for a pound cake, but sorta unique in modern baking—and also only bakes a quarter the time of my grandmother’s (making me wonder whether Filer’s would even work), and starts in a cold oven.

While the differences illustrate that Filer’s isn’t the source of my grandmother’s recipe, the similarities (and similar– that is, identical–titles) suggest Filer’s and my grandmother’s share an origin. Filer, like my grandmother since 1965, is a Richmonder. I’d like to think there’s an original “Betty’s Pound Cake” floating around the local church-lady cookbooks and/or recipe baskets somewhere in RVA. A deep-dive into my grandmother’s stack of plastic-spiral bounds may well yield some fruit.

But for now, the interwebs will suffice. There are a surprising number of “Betty’s Pound Cake”s about. Catherine Hill’s is very similar, though not exact (Hill). More interesting is Lydia Bates’s 1980 recipe, with instructions to “beat 20 minutes at moderate speed,” like my grandmother’s which is beaten for 15 (Bates 71). Bates’s is the only other I’ve encountered with this step and it’s an odd one. Over-beating usually is a cardinal sin with cakes as it builds gluten and theoretically toughens the final bake. Mary Berry—her name be praised—would be very cross indeed if we over-mixed her Victoria sponge; “as soon as everything is blended you should stop” (Berry). In this case, though, the beating does—visibly—build gluten, but instead of toughness, we get wonderfully dense, chewy pound cake.

Lydia Bates’s “Betty’s Pound Cake” (1980)

The smoking gun is the cold  oven–that is, not preheated. Several cold oven pound cake recipes also, like Filer’s, resemble my grandmother’s. James Villas’s  from 2007 is effectively the same as Filer’s and equally similar to my grandmother’s (Villas 347). Anne Byrn includes a cold oven pound cake in her chapter on American cakes from 1917-45. It too is very similar in its proportions to my grandmother’s, though more so to Filer’s, but less sweet than either (Byrn 162). Cook’s Illustrated’s exacting recipe in Cook’s Science is similar too, with only slight tweaking to the amounts (Crosby 147).

Why bake in a cold oven, anyway? It’s not a traditional technique, and given that cold oven pound cakes are apparently traditional, it does seem odd. James Villas suggests an explanation, “the only possibly explanation,” in fact, “that in the old days some vessels used to bake cakes…risked cracking if exposed to a sudden blast of heat from a preheated oven” (Villas 347). Byrn’s is that as gas ovens came in to use around 1900, home bakers especially prized recipes that conserved precious gas. With the cold oven technique, “you didn’t light the oven until you were ready to use it” (Byrn 162). Cook’s Illustrated agrees and I’m with them (Crosby 147).

So it seems my grandmother’s recipe is someone’s (Her’s? The recipe is in her handwriting…) adaption of a cold oven pound cake, with the addition of leavening and decidedly not baked in a cold oven. Why not? I can only guess. My suspicion is that my grandmother, terrified of waste—she washes and reuses paper plates—tweaked (or found someone else’s tweak of) a cold oven recipe for fear of wasting “all those eggs and butter.” I’ve heard her utter as much in reference to cold oven baking before, suggesting passing familiarity with it at least. That’s all hearsay, of course, but it seems fitting.

So, here it is, my grandmother’s—Nana’s—pound cake. Really, don’t skip the 15 minutes beating or you’ll skip out on the dense, stodginess we’re all here for (alas, you will need a mixer—stand or hand-held—for this). Also, 325°F for 1 hour and 15 minutes; don’t mess with this either or you won’t get that sexy crack ’round the center (or down the middle if you’re using loaf tins) with it’s pale, seemingly underdone bit. You want that. Grandma periodically gets it in her head that it’s raw and starts messing with the time and temp and then we have to rein her back in. Don’t be Grandma.

Nana’s Pound Cake
Makes one 10-inch bundt or two 8×4-inch loaves

225 g (1 cup) unsalted butter, softened
112 g (½ cup) vegetable shortening (Crisco)
640 g (3 cups) granulated sugar
5 large eggs
500 g (3 cups) all-purpose flour
1 tsp baking powder
½ tsp kosher salt
1 cup 2% milk
½ tsp vanilla extract
½ tsp lemon extract
¾ tsp almond extract

Preheat oven to 325°F and grease bundt tin or grease and line loaf tins.

Cream together butter, shortening, and sugar fully until light, fluffy, and pale. Add eggs, one at a time, fully incorporating each before adding the next. Scrape down sides and beat for 2 minutes until expanded in volume and quite fluffy.

In another bowl, whisk together the flour, baking powder, and salt. Stir vanilla, lemon, and almond extract into the milk (saves washing up). Mix dry into the creamed mixture in thirds, alternating and ending with the milk (flour-milk, flour-milk, flour-milk). When combined, scrape down the sides and beat on medium speed for 15 minutes.

Pour batter into tin(s) and bake 1 hour and 45 minutes for the bundt, or 1 hour and 30 minutes for the loaves. Do not open the oven until at least within 15 minutes of end time. When done, cake(s) should be brown, slightly blistered and cracked down the center(s). A tester stuck in the center should come out clean.

Cool in the tin(s) on a wire rack for 10 minutes. Remove from tin(s) and cool completely.

References

Bates, Lydia Richardson. “Betty’s Pound Cake.” Fare Thee Well II (Iowa Falls, IA: General Publishing and Binding, 1980), http://cooks.aadl.org/cooks/222721.

Berry, Mary. “Mary Berry’s perfect Victoria sandwich.” BBC Food (2017), http://www.bbc.co.uk/food/recipes/mary_berrys_perfect_34317.

Byrn, Anne. American Cake: Colonial Gingerbread to Classic Layer, the Stories and Recipes Behind More Than 125 of Our Best-Love Cakes from Past to Present. New York: Rodale, 2016.

Crosby, Guy. Cook’s Science: How to Unlock Flavor in 50 of Our Favorite Ingredients. Brookline, MA: America’s Test Kitchen, 2016.

Filer, Eleana. “Tried & True”: Recipes from Eleana’s Kitchen. Lenexa, KA: Cookbook Publishers, Inc., 2000.

Greenberg, Julia. “Green Bean Casserole: The History Behind this Classic Comfort Food and Thanksgiving Staple.” International Business Times (11/15/11), http://www.ibtimes.com/green-bean-casserole-history-behind-classic-comfort-food-thanksgiving-staple-370464.

Grundhauser, Eric. “The McDonald’s First Store Museum Is a Fast-Food Time Capsule From the Heyday of Drive-Thrus.” Slate (July 2, 2015), http://www.slate.com/blogs/atlas_obscura/2015/07/02/the_mcdonald_s_first_store_museum_is_a_fast_food_time_capsule_from_the_heyday.html.

Hill, Catherine. “Betty’s Pound Cake.” The Great Family Cookbook Project (November 3, 2011), http://www.cookbookfundraiser.com/recipe/2748605/bettys-pound-cake.html.

“Mush (cornmeal).” Wikipedia (6 September 2016), https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mush_(cornmeal).

Villas, James. The Glory of Southern Cooking. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2007.

“Who ‘invented’ the TV dinner?” Everyday Mysteries (August 23, 2010), http://www.loc.gov/rr/scitech/mysteries/tvdinner.html.