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One-Egg Filling
1 T flour (mixed with the sugar.) vanilla to taste Cook until thick enough to spread between layers.
Yolk 1 egg. 4 T water. 1/2 C sugar. Juice 1 lemon 2/3 C sugar 1 t flour
A church-supper cooked filling of the boiled-custard type, set down in the compressed shorthand community cookbooks used when everyone was assumed to know the method already. The text as printed has clearly been jumbled in typesetting, so read it as a list of ingredients rather than a sequence.
- The missing eggThe title promises one egg and the ingredient list never names it. Beat one whole egg into the sugar and flour before the lemon juice goes in; without it there is nothing here but sweetened lemon paste.
- Two flour measuresThe line gives both 1 tablespoon and 1 teaspoon of flour. It is not clear whether these are two separate additions or one instruction set twice. A tablespoon is the reading that will give a filling stiff enough to hold between layers; a teaspoon will give something closer to a sauce.
- AbbreviationsT is tablespoon, t teaspoon, C cup. The juice of one lemon is roughly 3 tablespoons, though lemons vary a good deal in size and yield.
- Mix dry before wetThe parenthesis matters: rub the flour through the sugar first. Flour dropped straight into lemon juice and egg will lump and no amount of beating afterwards will fully clear it.
- Gentle heatAcid and egg together curdle easily over direct flame. Cook in a double boiler or a heavy pan over low heat, stirring constantly, until it coats the spoon and holds a line drawn through it, five to eight minutes.
- Cool before spreadingIt thickens further as it cools. Spread it warm and it runs down the sides of the cake; chilled to room temperature it sits between layers as intended.
- YieldAbout three quarters of a cup, enough for one layer of an eight- or nine-inch cake. Double it for a three-layer cake.
- KeepingEgg-thickened, so it belongs in the refrigerator; use it within a few days.
Lemon fillings built on one egg, a little sugar and a spoonful of flour are common in American community cookbooks of the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the flour doing some of the work a second or third egg would do in a richer kitchen. Recipes titled by their egg count -- one-egg cake, one-egg filling, one-egg custard -- are a familiar feature of these collections. Such books were generally assembled from contributions written out in each cook's own shorthand, and compression and garbling of the kind seen here are common in them.