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Lemon Cake
Beat the yolks of six eggs thoroughly. Add half a pound of sifted sugar, the grated rind of a lemon, and two table-spoonfuls of orange-flower water. Beat all together for some minutes. Dredge in gradually six ounces of flour, add the strained lemon-juice and the whites of the eggs whisked to a firm froth. Mix thoroughly, put the mixture into buttered tins, and bake immediately. Time to bake, about an hour. Probable cost, 1s. Sufficient for a pint mould.
A whisked sponge with no chemical leavening at all — the only lift comes from air beaten into the yolks and whites, which is why the instruction to bake immediately carries more weight than anything else here.
- Bake immediately means itWith no baking powder or soda, the foam begins collapsing the moment the flour goes in. Have the tins buttered and the oven at temperature before you start beating, and get the batter in within a minute or two of folding.
- Oven temperatureCassell's gives none. A cake of this type wants a moderate oven, 325-350F; an hour at 350F suits a deep tin, less for shallow ones. Test with a skewer rather than trusting the stated time.
- WeightsHalf a pound of sugar is 8 oz (about 1 cup plus 2 tablespoons of granulated), six ounces of flour is roughly 1 1/3 cups. Weigh if you can — the ratio of sugar to flour is what keeps this tender.
- Sifted sugarIn Victorian recipes this generally means sugar broken up and passed through a sieve, not modern icing sugar with its added starch. Caster or fine granulated is a reasonable modern equivalent.
- Dredge in graduallyDredging means sifting or shaking the flour over the surface in stages, not tipping it in. Fold with a spatula, cutting down and turning over, and stop the moment no dry streaks remain.
- Orange-flower waterStill sold, usually in the baking or Middle Eastern aisle. Strength varies a good deal between brands, and two tablespoons may taste strongly perfumed; start with less and judge.
- Order of the whitesThe lemon juice and the whisked whites go in together at the end. Loosen the heavy yolk batter with a spoonful of the whites first, then fold in the rest, or the foam will be knocked flat trying to combine them.
- Yield"Sufficient for a pint mould" sits oddly with six eggs and fourteen ounces of sugar and flour, which will yield well more than a pint of batter. Use a tin or tins filled no more than two-thirds. "Probable cost, 1s." is a shilling in Victorian money and is of no use except as a price record.
Lemon cake of this kind belongs to the long line of English whisked sponges related to the earlier biscuit and Savoy cake, which relied wholly on egg foam for their rise; chemical raising agents were commercially available well before Cassell's New Dictionary of Cookery was compiled, yet older egg-only formulas kept their place in the books. The orange-flower water is a mark of the recipe's ancestry: distilled floral waters were a standard confectioner's flavouring in earlier centuries, kept in the still-room alongside rose water, and they lingered in cake recipes long after vanilla had begun to displace them. Grated lemon rind and orange-flower water were a common pairing, and the combination is still recognisable in Mediterranean and Middle Eastern baking.