Great Grandmother's Pound Cake and Castle Bundt - 2009-06-23 15:04:43
<<< Previous - Montana Photos to Come, Meanwhile - Latvian Midsummer Fest | Next - Montana Fest 2009: Morgan Photos! >>>First, let me introduce you to my mother's recipe box:
Mom gave this to me when I went off to live on my own after college when I was (theoretically) going to attempt to cook for myself. Which isn't saying much, in this era where food can easily be taken from the freezer and pop'd into the microwave it's not like I was going to starve. Also I've always been a fan of leftover pizza, and I can remember enjoying many meals of that sort when I lived down the street from a
Somerville fast food mecca. (I was a stone's throw from Davis Square.) But Mom did try to encourage me to eat a bit more healthy foods, and the recipe cards in the box included things she'd copied from her own most used recipes. The most humorous card explains how to cook broccoli. ("Wash broccoli. Cut in pieces." - the part about cutting it up written to the side, as an afterthought, possibly thinking that I might not realize I should do that.) I was a notoriously picky eater, and my parents still marvel when I eat broccoli today. Never mind that it's been one of my favorite vegetables for about twenty years - "oh look dear, she's eating her broccoli!" But they did have to suffer through all those childhood years when I'd only eat raw carrots and lettuce, without any salad dressing. Another idea of how odd I was - I was a child of southerners who would not eat gravy, which was very much an oddity. Of course now it's the case that gravy isn't exactly good for you, so it's no tragedy that I'm not addicted to it.
Here's the inside of the box, which also tells a story. First note that there's not really any organization going here. There are those alphabetical tabs in the back that were meant to put things in order - but then there really aren't that many recipes that I've collected, so it seems like more trouble than necessary. Plus half the fun of this box is thumbing through all the cards in search of just one - and rediscovering things. And smiling over the various dishes that I remember. I really need to try this one noodle recipe that a friend gave me - she knew of my love for this one nearby restaurant's (again, when I lived in Massachusetts) sesame noodle dish (very tasty cold or hot), and said that this recipe was a fair copy of it. There's another friend's "It Can't Be This Easy Hummus," which was my favorite party snack in the late 80s. There are some other cards that I recognize were written by a southern friend, giving step by step instructions to more incredibly simple (to other cooks) recipes that I never had made myself. And I'm still not the type of person who gets up in the morning and says "I simply MUST cook some squash today!" It could happen...someday. In a distant future. Perhaps.
This box is actually a piece of family history because it's one my mother used in her high school
Home Economics class. I went to a small midwestern high school where there was no such thing as Home Ec. Plus in the 80s that was the sort of class that most schools were starting to phase out, along with shop. (I would have loved to take a shop class, and I still wish I could take welding classes again. I learned to silver weld ages ago in Mass., but it takes a lot of equipment and is an expensive hobby. Especially now that the price of metals has increased.) If you notice that part of the photo is blurred - that's where my mother had written her name in pencil. Under the lid of the box she wrote her address and phone number. And we're talking about a time long enough ago in rural eastern Texas that the phone number is only four digits long. (You could still call a 5 digit number at my grandmother's Texas home to reach your neighbors in the 1970s - no idea if that was normal for the rest of the country.)
Anyway, about the cake. While I never have days where I have "a wild hair" (
slang for "sudden decision" in case that's too folksy a term) and must cook up some zucchini, I do find myself wishing for pound cake. It's one of the recipes I have several versions of in this box. If you've never heard of
pound cake (which is a surreal concept to me, it's that ingrained in my life) it's a cake that contained a pound of each of the following: butter, eggs, sugar and flour. But the exact measurements of each are actually a lot more flexible, and vary from recipe to recipe. The one I'm using here is written on the recipe card as
Mama's Pound Cake - which is what my mother's mother called it, since it was actually my mother's grandmother's version of the recipe. I've added some notes in italics to clarify things - the version I have is a lot more brief.
2 cups sugar
1/2 lb. butter
6 large eggs
2 cups cake flour
1 1/2 teaspoons vanilla (more or less, as you wish)
1/4 teaspoon of mace or nutmeg (or 1/2 teaspoon, your call - the recipe doesn't actually give a measured amount, and I always use nutmeg myself)
Cream sugar and butter together well. Add eggs one at a time. Slowly beat in the flour, vanilla and mace or nutmeg.
Pour into greased bundt cake pan. (Recipe doesn't bother to tell you this part, because you were just supposed to know the pan type and greasing part.)
Bake 15 minutes at 250 degrees, 15 minutes at 275 degrees, and 25 minutes at 300 degrees.
That great grandmother of mine was well known among her neighbors as being a wonderful cook, and my parents still speak with reverence of her fried chicken and her cobbler that she made in a huge metal dish tub. It was important to make a LOT of a dessert in order to have something on hand to offer company during the week. In fact I was raised to understand that there was nothing worse than
not having something to offer guests, even if they were unexpected. At the very least you had to offer a beverage (iced tea), and keeping a dessert on hand was something most women in the area did as well. Even in the 70s when I'd come for my annual summer visit the tradition of "visiting" was still in place. You'd call ahead (often but not always, depending on how well you knew the person) and then go make the rounds to a few or several friends, depending on whether you had to run errands as well. Then you'd sit and talk, eat and drink, and cover all the family and local gossip. Because I was a grandchild these sorts of visits were to both show me off to the friends, and to get me used to socializing. (I was ridiculously shy back then.) Men did this "visiting" thing too - they would just talk more about the farming and sports. But the food was always an important part of the social ritual.
Pound cake was wonderful because it was quick to make, kept for a long time, and could be served in multiple ways. It's dry, so it goes well with coffee or tea, or milk. You can add a plain or flavored glaze to it, or serve fresh fruit on top or as a side. It makes a great breakfast coffee cake or a late night snack. It travels well. My grandmother even used to mail it to me, knowing how much I loved it. Even when one showed up in a box that had been almost completely flattened we ate it anyway.
I can remember my grandmother making this cake after we'd visited cousins who kept chickens. They'd give us some eggs laid just that day and we'd go home to immediately make a pound cake. I can also remember her explaining the importance of real butter - since at the time my parents used margarine for everything. (Butter was on the Not To Use list because of Mom's high blood pressure. Which had made her pass out at work before - so we took this fairly seriously.) My grandmother was not quite the cook as her mother had been - but then, she never really aspired to be, being a well known drama teacher at the local college. In fact she would often "tell stories on herself" of times when she'd gotten busy on the phone and forgotten to count cups of ingredients into a cake or added baking soda instead of baking powder, or some such mistake. If something was completely inedible it could always be fed to the birds - it was nothing to get bothered about.
When I saw this cake pan my first thought was "that's the perfect thing to use for pound cake!"
Since I like to leave my pound cake plain (I never manage to keep in on hand long enough to add fruit) having a design is the most amusing. Only thing that's a tad tricky with this castle is all the fiddly little details. If you use something like this make sure you grease the pan well, and you may want to flour it as well.
For those wondering where I got this - I think it was Bed, Bath and Beyond. The manufacturer is Nordicware and it's called Castle Bundt.
There's the finished product and you can tell that the outer shell of the door stuck to the pan. I made plenty of grumbling noises about that. Another thing that's a touch tricky are those four turrets. Those areas may finish baking more quickly than the middle point - but then, you expect pound cake to be dry and not moist. It's ability to absorb things is why it's so flexible.
Jon is not particularly interested in pound cake. But then I made sure to buy him some fixings for guacamole and have chips on hand. He's more the salty snacks kinda guy anyway.
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