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Lemon Cake, Rich
Beat three-quarters of a pound of fresh butter to a cream. Work into it six ounces of dried flour, and add three-quarters of a pound of powdered sugar, the grated rind of two lemons, and the well-beaten yolks of nine eggs. When thoroughly mixed, stir in the white of six eggs, beaten to a firm froth, and two table-spoonfuls of brandy. Put the mixture into a well-buttered mould, and bake in a moderate oven. Time to bake, nearly an hour. Probable cost, 2s. 6d. Sufficient for a pint and a half mould.
A Victorian pound-cake variant leavened entirely by egg white and creamed butter, with no chemical raising agent at all. The success of it rests on how much air you beat in and how little you knock out.
- The hinge: air is the only leaveningThere is no baking powder or soda here. Cream the butter and sugar until genuinely pale and light, whip the six whites to a firm but not dry froth, and fold them in with a spatula rather than stirring. Overworking at the fold stage gives a dense, greasy cake.
- "Dried flour"Victorian cooks warmed flour in a low oven or before the fire to drive off damp, since flour was stored in sacks in cold larders. Modern bagged flour needs no drying. Sift it, and note the proportion is deliberately low, six ounces to twelve of butter and sugar each, so the crumb is closer to a rich sponge than a plain cake.
- "Powdered sugar"This means finely ground sugar, what we would call caster sugar, not modern confectioners' sugar with its added cornstarch. Caster sugar creams into butter far better than granulated.
- A moderate ovenThe book gives no temperatures; 'moderate' is conventionally read as somewhere around 350F/175C. Given the quantity of butter and the absence of chemical leavening, the lower end is safer; 325F/165C with a slightly longer bake will guard against the outside setting before the centre rises.
- Timing"Nearly an hour" assumes a smallish mould. Test with a skewer at 50 minutes and expect anywhere up to 70 minutes depending on depth. The cake should be springy and just pulling from the sides.
- The mould size does not match the batterA pint and a half is about three and a half US cups, roughly 850 ml, which will not hold three-quarters of a pound each of butter and sugar plus nine yolks and six whisked whites. Either the original intends several such moulds or the figure is an error. Fill any tin no more than two-thirds and bake the surplus separately.
- EggsVictorian eggs ran smaller than today's large eggs. Using nine large yolks and six large whites will give a wetter, looser batter than intended; medium eggs are closer to the mark.
- Yield and servingMade as one cake in a buttered and lined 8-inch tin, this serves ten to twelve. It keeps well wrapped for several days and improves on the second day as the lemon and brandy settle through the crumb.
This belongs to the pound-cake family that dominated English baking from the eighteenth century onward, built on equal weights of butter, sugar and egg with flour adjusted to taste, and lifted by beating rather than by any raising agent. The lemon rind and the spoonfuls of brandy are the standard Georgian and Victorian flavourings for such a cake, the brandy doing double duty as a preservative of a sort in a household that expected a rich cake to sit in a tin for a week. Cassell's, published in parts from the 1870s and gathered into the Dictionary of Cookery, seems to have been aimed largely at middle-class households running a cook, which is why the entry ends with a costing: two shillings and sixpence was a substantial outlay for a single cake, reflecting the price of butter, sugar and eggs, and it marks this as a recipe for a table with visitors at it rather than an everyday tea.