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Queen's Drops
Beat half a pound of fresh butter to cream. Add eight ounces of finely-powdered sugar, a quarter of a nutmeg, grated, and, gradually, four well-beaten eggs. Beat the mixture for five or six minutes, then add lightly eight ounces of dried flour and two ounces of picked and dried currants. Drop the batter from the end of a spoon in small balls the size of a pigeon's egg, upon a baking-sheet spread with butter, and bake in a hot oven. When nearly cold, take the drops off the paper. Time to bake, ten to fifteen minutes. Probable cost, 1s. 8d.
A plain drop cake of the queen-cake family: equal weights of butter, sugar, flour and eggs, with nutmeg and currants. Nothing in it raises the batter but the air you beat in, so the beating is the whole recipe.
- Weights and yieldHalf a pound of butter is 225 g (2 US sticks); eight ounces of sugar is about 1 cup, eight ounces of flour about 1¾ cups, two ounces of currants a scant ½ cup. Eggs of the period were on average smaller than today's large eggs, so expect a slightly slacker batter if you use four large ones. The batter should make something in the region of 30 to 45 drops, depending on how generously you spoon them.
- The hinge: air is the only leaveningThere is no baking powder here. Cream the butter and sugar until genuinely pale and light, then add the beaten eggs a little at a time so the mixture never breaks, and fold the flour in with a light hand. Over-worked flour after the eggs go in gives flat, tough drops.
- "A hot oven"For small cakes of this kind, 400–425°F (200–220°C). The ten to fifteen minutes is accurate at that heat; they are done when the edges colour and the tops spring back.
- "Dried flour"Flour of the period could carry damp, and warming or drying it before use was a recognised precaution. Modern bagged flour needs nothing; just sift it.
- Powdered sugarThis means sugar pounded fine from a loaf, not modern confectioners' sugar with its cornstarch. Use caster (superfine) sugar, or granulated pulsed briefly in a grinder.
- NutmegA quarter of a whole nutmeg is roughly half a teaspoon grated — assertive but not wrong for the style. Grate it fresh; pre-ground has lost much of its aroma.
- CurrantsDried Zante currants, not fresh redcurrants or blackcurrants. "Picked" means gone over for stalks and grit, which packaged fruit no longer needs. Toss them in a spoonful of the measured flour so they hold their place in the batter.
- Sheet and paperThe instruction is internally inconsistent — it says a buttered baking-sheet, then tells you to lift the drops off the paper. Line the sheet with parchment and the problem disappears. Space them well; the batter spreads.
- SizeA pigeon's egg is about 1½ inches long, so roughly a tablespoon of batter per drop.
Queen cakes were a staple of English baking from the eighteenth century onward — a rich creamed butter mixture with currants and spice, most often baked in small fluted or heart-shaped tins and served at tea. "Drops" is simply the tin-less version: the same batter spooned straight onto a sheet, quicker to turn out in quantity and requiring no special moulds, which made it useful in households that owned one baking-sheet and not a dozen patty pans. Nutmeg and currants were common flavourings for small cakes of this class, cheap and shelf-stable in a way that fresh fruit was not. Cassell's habit of quoting a probable cost — 1s. 8d. here — marks this as a modest rather than a luxury bake.