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Lemon Cake (One and one-half cups sugar)
One and one-half cups sugar, one of butter, two and one-half of flour, five eggs beaten separately, four tea-spoons sweet milk, teaspoon cream tartar, half tea-spoon soda. For Jelly. Take coffee-cup sugar, two table-spoons butter, two eggs, and the juice of two lemons: beat all together and boil until the consistency of jelly. For orange cake use oranges instead of lemons. Miss Minnie Brown.
A creamed butter cake leavened with cream of tartar and soda, split into layers and spread with a boiled lemon filling — what a modern kitchen would call lemon curd. The original assumes you know the pans, the oven and the method, so those are the gaps worth filling.
- The hinge: the fillingThe instruction to "boil until the consistency of jelly" is the one place this can go wrong. A mixture of eggs, butter, sugar and lemon juice curdles if it reaches a true rolling boil; cook it over low heat or a water bath, stirring constantly, until it thickens and coats a spoon (about 170F). It sets further as it cools, so pull it earlier than looks right.
- Cup measuresA cup of butter is 8 oz, two US sticks. A "coffee-cup" in period recipes is generally read as roughly a standard cup; treat it as about a cup of sugar for the filling and adjust to taste against the lemons.
- Four teaspoons of milkFour teaspoons is a very small amount of liquid for this much flour, and may be a misprint; but rich cakes of the period do sometimes rely almost entirely on eggs for moisture, and five eggs will carry it. Expect a very stiff batter before the whites go in. Beat the whites to soft peaks and fold them in last.
- LeaveningOne teaspoon cream of tartar with half a teaspoon soda is the era's homemade baking powder, roughly equivalent to about two teaspoons of modern double-acting powder. Sift the soda and cream of tartar with the flour and get the cake into the oven promptly, since single-acting leavening spends much of its lift on contact.
- OvenNo temperature is given because the book assumes a wood range. Bake layers at 350F. Three 9-inch layers take 18-22 minutes; four thinner layers, 15-18.
- Sweet milkSimply fresh unsoured milk, specified to distinguish it from the buttermilk or sour milk called for in soda-only recipes. Whole milk is the right substitute.
- Assembly and yieldCool the layers completely and cool the filling before spreading, or it runs. Three or four layers give 10 to 12 servings. The recipe gives no icing, so the top can simply be left plain or dusted with sugar.
- KeepingThe filling is an egg custard and the finished cake should be refrigerated after the first day. It is at its best within two or three days, after which the acid begins to soften the crumb.
Lemon cake of this type — plain butter layers with a cooked lemon filling between them — was a fixture of American community cookbooks from the 1870s onward, and Buckeye Cookery (compiled in Marysville, Ohio, and first published in 1877) prints several versions credited to individual contributors, as this one is to Miss Minnie Brown. The layer cake itself was bound up with two nineteenth-century conveniences: refined flour and sugar, and matched tin layer pans, which made splitting a batter into thin rounds practical for home bakers. The filling is a lemon curd by another name; nineteenth-century American books often called it "jelly" or "lemon butter," the term "curd" being more common in British usage. The closing line — use oranges instead of lemons — is characteristic of the book's economy.