The pound cake: a simple egg, butter, and flour cake (one pound each), but here’s the thing about it: it can absorb all sorts of ingredients: lemon, vanilla, nutmeg, rose water, oranges.
While the blandness of the pound cake suggests the blandness of mid-20th Century American food with all traces of “ethnicity” pounded out of it, I’ve learned that cultures all over the world have their own pound cakes. Since the 18th Century, pound cake has been acculturated. In Mexico, it’s made with walnuts and raisins, in the French Caribbean with rum and bananas, in Columbia and Venezuela with wine-soaked cake and cream coating, and in Germany it’s made as a “fake venison saddle” frosted with bitter chocolate and almonds (of course, Germany!)
Reminiscing about Sara Lee
My book club recently spent some time happily reminiscing about the Sara Lee pound cakes many of us ate growing up. Some recalled an extra tucked away in the freezer in case “someone came by.” But the Sara Lee pound cake often absorbed what was around it. My mother soaked pieces of it in rosewater to make rose cake reminiscent of her time in India. A friend remembered making Baked Alaska from hers. My Jewish husband talked about eating an unleavened Kosher version for Passover.
Quaker Foodways
Like the pound cake, Quaker cuisine may have begun as Northern European food but Quakers who came to America absorbed foodways from the New World: Native American, African American, Pennsylvania German.
Such a cake also belied the myth of the “self-sufficent” community with all foodstuffs coming from within a few miles. For where did the lemons suggested in the 1845 Quaker recipe I used come from? Nutmeg? Even if American Quakers opposed the Caribbean slavery that produced white sugar, their substituted maple sugar would have to come from New England.
The Quaker Woman’s Cookbook
So why am I here making pound cake? 2024 is going to be the year I concentrate on the Quaker Woman’s Cookbook by Elizabeth Ellicott Lea and I began by making her “Washington Cake,” which I soon realized was pound cake.
Born in Ellicott City, Maryland in 1793, Lea was a descendant of the Brooke family who were wealthy landowners in Maryland and the Ellicotts who had a thriving flour business.
Widowed at a young age, and ill herself, Lea began to write a unique cookbook at a time when she faced financial peril. After Lea’s husband’s death, his nurse, Rebecca Russell continued on in Lea’s household, helping Elizabeth to cook and write. At times, Russell cooked in a kitchen below a bedroom where Lea would yell out instructions as she lay on her sickbed. How can this not be a scene in a novel?
Combining foods from the Tidewater South, from Anglo-American cookery, and the Pennsylvania Germans, and including many rural and folk recipes, Lea financed and published “Domestic Cookery” in 1845. William Woys Weaver’s introduction to the cookbook states: “She intended her book to serve as a handbook for the inexperienced bride who entered into marriage knowing nothing about the state of the art.” Those brides included Lea herself. Wow, that’s a scene too, right?
Sandy Spring
And then there’s the world of Sandy Spring, a Quaker community that embraced race amity a hundred years before Abolition. What was this world like? My great-grandmother grew up in it until she joined my great-grandfather and the Philadelphia area Quakers.
This year, I plan to explore this story world and take a deep dive into “Quaker cooking.” If I make any other Quaker food that turns out ok, I’ll put photos up on Instagram @holyexperiment1682
Let me know if you have any plans to dive into Quaker fiction or cooking this year!
Happy New Year, Kate
P.S. I found this great website where Kara Mae Harris re-creates many of Lea’s recipes down to growing her own hops to make yeast.
P.P.S. A shortened version of my blog on “What Not to Wear” to my first Historical Novel Society Conference recently made it into the HNS newsletter and conference website if you want to take a look.
Looks delish!
Sorry I didnt save any!