Lemon Cake
2 cups Gold Medal flour 2 cups sugar 6 eggs 6 tablespoons butter 4 tablespoons milk 2 teaspoons cream tartar 1 teaspoon soda (or two of baking powder) 2/3 teaspoon salt Filling for Cake: 1 1/2 cups sugar 1/2 cup butter 4 eggs Rind of 3 lemons grated, and the juice Beat the butter, sugar and eggs together. Set into a dish of boiling water until heated; then add the lemon and stir until thick. Spread between layers of cake.
The book gives directions for the filling only and leaves the cake itself to the cook's judgment, which was normal in a flour-company pamphlet aimed at women who already knew how to build a layer cake. Here is what has to be supplied.
- Method for the cakeCream the butter with the sugar, beat in the eggs, then add the flour sifted with cream of tartar, soda and salt, alternately with the milk. With only 4 tablespoons of milk to 2 cups of flour, the six eggs supply most of the liquid, so the result is eggier than a modern butter cake.
- Oven and pansThe recipe gives no oven or pan directions. A moderate oven, around 350F, suits a cake of this kind, with 8- or 9-inch layers taking roughly 20 to 30 minutes. Test with a skewer at the centre.
- Cream of tartar and sodaThe pairing works as a homemade baking powder, and the recipe itself offers 2 teaspoons of baking powder as the alternative, though by modern reckoning 1 teaspoon of soda with 2 teaspoons of cream of tartar carries rather more leavening power than that. Use one system or the other, never both.
- Butter measure6 tablespoons is three-quarters of a stick, about 85 g. Half a cup in the filling is one stick, about 115 g.
- The filling is lemon curdThe recipe sets the dish into boiling water; modern practice is to hold the bowl over simmering water and stir constantly. It thickens around 170F; if it approaches a boil the eggs scramble and the curd turns grainy. Straining it through a sieve once it has thickened catches any set threads of egg and the coarser zest.
- Add the lemon last, as writtenThe butter, sugar and eggs are heated first and the lemon added only then; the recipe gives no reason for the order.
- Cooling and keepingThe curd firms considerably as it cools; spread it only when cold or it will run out from between the layers. Refrigerated, it keeps about a week, and this quantity makes appreciably more than a cake of this size needs.
- YieldEnough to fill a layer cake serving roughly 10 to 12. The recipe gives no icing beyond the filling.
Gold Medal Flour cookbooks were promotional publications of the Washburn-Crosby Company of Minneapolis, the milling firm that later became General Mills, and their recipes were written to demonstrate that a household could get bakery results from a bag of standardised roller-milled flour. That standardisation is the quiet point of a formula like this: earlier receipts had to hedge about the strength and dampness of the flour, while a branded product promised the same behaviour every time. The filling is what English cooks called lemon cheese or lemon curd, a preserve of eggs, butter, sugar and lemon cooked over water, and it moved readily into American use as a cake filling once tall layer cakes became the standard company cake in the second half of the nineteenth century. The cake itself sits at the moment when cream of tartar and soda, measured out separately, were being displaced by commercial baking powder, and the recipe accommodates both, giving the equivalence outright for cooks who had switched.