Butter and flour a 10 inch tube pan. Thoroughly cream together sugar and butter. Add eggs, one at a time, beating well after each edition. It is essential that the eggs be a room temperature, and that each be thoroughly incorporated into the batter.. Use a powerful electric mixer, and beat a full two minutes after adding each egg. Mix in half the flour, then the whipping cream, then the other half of the flour. Add vanilla. When all ingredients are combined, beat five minutes more. Pour batter into prepared pan. Set in Cold oven and turn heat to 350 degrees. Bake 60 to 70 minutes, until a sharp knife inserted in cake comes out clean. Cool in pan for five minutes. Remove from pan and cool thoroughly. Wrapped well, this cake keeps several days.

By Jane and Michael Stern, Tupelo, Miss.

Year around, Pilgrims of the Elvis World come to Memphis to tour Graceland, his mansion on the hill.

Then they take an hour's drive southeast along Hwy 78 to Tupelo, to visit the house where he was born. It is a tiny wood-frame shack on what used to be called the wrong side of town.

Presley loved to eat. All his life, from the time he was a skinny 20-year-old "Hillbilly Cat" playing rock 'n' roll in high school gyms throughout the South to the final years when his metabolism finally caught up and he began gaining weight, he relished country-style food. His taste was never fancy or exotic. Elvis hated sauced-up rich man's cooking and avoided highfalutin restaurants whenever possible. He liked pork chops and meat loaf and well-done cheeseburgers, biscuits and cornbread, vanilla ice cream, red Jell-O and pound cake.

Having spent the last few years researching a book about the Elvis World, we have sampled many Presley family recipes for things he liked to eat. A few weeks ago we were in Memphis visiting Todd Morgan, Graceland's manager of communications, when a Tupelo friend of Elvis' stopped by. This friend, who knew Elvis from the time he was 2, really knows how to cook. Among the presents she brought were a pair of pound cakes. She told us that Elvis adored these cakes; so each Christmas, and for his birthday, she would bake some and bring them to him at Graceland.

Todd, the lucky inheritor of this legacy, gets two large cakes every year. We all went out to "talk Elvis" at Gridley's (our favorite place for barbeque), but instead of having Mrs. Gridley's lemon pie for dessert, we returned to the Graceland offices and dug into one of the pound cakes from Tupelo.

What a classic! Moist and dense and buttery, simple and totally satisfying. It is a cake that can be improved only by a scoop of ice cream on each slice. The cakemaker, who prefers to remain anonymous lest she be deluged by Tupelonians requesting her cakes, shared her recipe with us. As far as we're concerned, it makes the ultimate pound cake- all the more fun to eat when you know that it was Elvis Presley's favorite.