Victorian recipes

All right, here we go:

From The Boston Cook Book, 1884 by Mrs. D. A. Lincoln

Pound Cake by Miss Ward
1 pound butter
1 pound sugar
10 eggs
1 pound flour
1/2 wineglass wine
1/2 wineglass brandy

Cream the butter; add the sugar, yolks of the eggs, wine, brandy, whites of the eggs, and the flour. Put currants into one fourth of the dough and almonds, blanched and pounded in rose water, into another part. Leave the remainder plain. Fill very small round tins three quarters full. Into half of those containing the plain dough put small pieces of citron, three in each, inserting the citron upright a little way into the dough. Sift sugar over the tops of those containing the citron and almond before putting them into the oven. Bake twenty minutes. Frost the plain and currant cakes. Pound cake is lighter when baked in small cakes than in loaves.
**Notes from Michelle:
Notice how she didn’t have an oven temperature?? I imagine it must have been very hard to cook without any way of knowing how hot the oven would be. Also, half the ingredients were in the directions and not the initial list of ingredients. What is citron? Candied lemon?? And rose water? I’m guessing she was making the equivalent of almond extract.
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