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Queen Cake
2/3 cup butter 2 cups flour (scant) 1/4 teaspoon soda Whites 6 eggs 1 1/4 cups powdered sugar 1 1/2 teaspoons lemon juice Cream the butter, add flour gradually, mixed and sifted with soda, then add lemon juice. Beat whites of eggs until stiff; add sugar gradually, and combine the mixtures. Bake fifty minutes in a long shallow pan. Cover with Opera Caramel Frosting.
A white cake built on the old "silver cake" principle: nothing but egg whites for lift and colour, with the butter creamed into flour rather than sugar. The original gives no oven temperature, which is the one thing you have to supply.
- Oven settingFifty minutes in a shallow pan points to a moderate oven, 325-350F. A hotter oven will brown the top of a white cake before the centre sets.
- Powdered sugarIn books of this period "powdered sugar" usually means finely granulated sugar, not the cornstarch-laced confectioners' sugar sold today. Superfine or caster sugar is the closest match and dissolves properly into the beaten whites.
- The hinge: creaming butter into flourButter is creamed and the flour worked in gradually, so the batter is a stiff paste before the meringue arrives. Fold the whites in two or three additions, sacrificing the first to loosen the paste, or you will knock out all the air trying to combine the two.
- The sodaA quarter teaspoon of soda with only 1 1/2 teaspoons lemon juice has very little acid to react with; it is doing more for tenderness and colour than for rise. The lift comes from the egg whites, so beat them stiff but not dry.
- Scant flour"Scant" means to fill the cup and level it a little under, not to pack it. Spoon the flour into the cup and level it off; two firmly packed cups will give a dry cake in a batter with no added liquid.
- The panA "long shallow pan" is a sheet or jelly-roll style pan; something in the 9x13 inch range will do, giving a thin layer. Line the bottom, and test at 40 minutes.
- The frostingOpera Caramel Frosting is a separate recipe elsewhere in these books; follow that recipe rather than assuming its ingredients. Failing that, a boiled caramel-style frosting stands in for it.
- YieldAbout 16 to 20 squares cut from the sheet, depending on how generously you slice.
Queen cakes in English cookery were originally small rich currant cakes baked in little fluted or heart-shaped tins, a fixture of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century receipt books. By the time American domestic-science writers were compiling books like this one, the name had drifted onto a larger white cake made with egg whites alone: the "silver" half of the silver-and-gold pair that let a thrifty cook use up whites from one recipe and yolks in another. The choice of whites is as much about appearance as flavour, since a pale, fine-grained crumb was prized at a time when very white flour and refined sugar still signalled a well-provisioned kitchen. The instruction to finish it with a named frosting from elsewhere in the book is typical of the period, when cakes and their icings were catalogued separately and mixed to taste.