Home › Cookery › Lemon Jelly Cake (Bake as for the orange cake)
Lemon Jelly Cake (Bake as for the orange cake)
Bake as for the orange cake. For the jelly: take the juice and rind of three lemons, one pound sugar, one-quarter pound butter, six eggs; beat together; scald as you do custard. When cool, it must be thick-spread between the cakes; ice the top.--Mrs. C. C.
This is a filling recipe, not a cake recipe: the layers come from the orange cake elsewhere in the book, and what is given here is a lemon curd to spread between them. Everything hinges on how gently you cook the eggs.
- "Scald as you do custard"This does not mean boil. Cook the mixture in a double boiler or a heavy pan over low heat, stirring constantly, until it thickens and coats the spoon — around 170-175F. A hard boil scrambles the eggs and the filling breaks into curds and liquid.
- Weights in cupsOne pound of granulated sugar is about 2 1/4 cups; one-quarter pound of butter is 1/2 cup, or one standard American stick. Eggs of the period may have run smaller than today's large eggs, in which case five large eggs would be nearer the original mass; six will simply give a firmer set.
- Rind means zestGrate only the yellow outer layer of the three lemons, or pare it in strips and steep it in the mixture, then strain. The white pith underneath is bitter and will not soften with cooking.
- Strain before coolingPour the finished curd through a fine sieve while hot. This catches any set egg and the grated rind, and is the difference between a glossy filling and a grainy one.
- Thick-spread, and coldThe instruction to spread it thick when cool is deliberate — warm curd runs out of the layers. Chill it until it holds a shape, then use it generously between two or three thin layers.
- Icing the top"Ice the top" here will not mean a modern buttercream; period icings of this date are generally beaten egg white with sifted sugar, or a boiled sugar icing. Confectioners' sugar beaten with a little lemon juice to a spreadable paste is a simple modern substitute.
- Yield and keepingThree lemons with a pound of sugar makes roughly 3 to 4 cups of curd, ample for a two- or three-layer 8- or 9-inch cake. Because it is butter-and-egg based, keep the finished cake refrigerated and eat it within three or four days.
Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1877), compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree from contributions by some 250 Virginia housekeepers, is full of recipes signed with initials like "Mrs. C. C." "Jelly cake" in this period described any cake of thin layers built up with a soft filling spread between them — the name itself derives from layers spread with jelly, and fruit fillings remained common. The mixture here — citrus juice and zest, sugar, butter and whole eggs thickened over gentle heat — is what appears in print as lemon curd or lemon cheese, preparations already published well before 1877, and the same custard was used interchangeably as a cake filling, a tart filling, or a spread for bread. That the recipe simply points back to the orange cake for the layers is typical of the book's economy: the compiler assumed a cook who already knew how to make a plain layer cake and needed only to be told what to put between them.