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Four Eggs (Little Citron and grated)
A little Citron, and grated Lemon-peel.
Cream the butter and sugar together, add the grated lemon-peel, stir in the eggs one at a time, sift the flour and add it by degrees. Butter a cake-tin, pour in the mixture, smooth it over and put a few pieces of citron on the top. Bake forty minutes in a moderate oven.
This is a plain four-egg cake in the pound-cake family, and the book has left the weights in the heading rather than the text. The instructions are complete; the quantities have to be reconstructed.
- The missing quantitiesRecipes of this type were built on the weight of the eggs: roughly equal parts butter, sugar and flour, about 8 oz (225 g) of each for four eggs. That is a reconstruction, not something the page states, so treat the proportions as a starting point rather than a transcription.
- Moderate oven350F (175C). Forty minutes suits a shallow tin about 8 inches across; a deeper 7-inch tin will want closer to an hour. Test with a skewer at the centre.
- CitronCandied citron peel, from Citrus medica — a thick-rinded citrus grown mainly for preserving. Sold in blocks or diced in the baking aisle around the winter holidays; candied mixed peel or candied orange peel is the usual substitute. It is not lemon, and not the soft drink.
- Creaming actually matters hereThere is no chemical raising agent in this cake at all. The lift comes entirely from air beaten into the butter and sugar and from the eggs, so cream until visibly pale and light, five minutes or more with a mixer.
- Eggs one at a timeFollow this literally, and have the eggs at room temperature. Four eggs added quickly into cold butter will curdle the batter; a spoonful of the weighed flour will bring a split mixture back together.
- Adding the flour"By degrees" means gradually, a portion at a time. Add it with a light hand rather than beating hard: once the flour is wet, prolonged beating develops gluten and can make the crumb tough.
- Citron on topPieces sitting proud of the surface can scorch before the cake is done. Press them lightly into the smoothed batter so they are half sunk.
- YieldAbout eight to ten slices. Wrapped, it will keep for three or four days.
The four-egg cake is a shorthand of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century kitchen, where cakes were often named for their eggs or their pounds rather than for a flavour: the pound cake took a pound each of butter, sugar, flour and eggs, and the smaller household versions scaled the same equal-weight idea down to whatever number of eggs was on hand. Citron and grated lemon peel are a common flavouring for cakes of this kind in British and American recipe books, candied peel being one of the concentrated flavourings a cook could keep in the store cupboard for months.