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Lemon Queens
2 teaspoons baking powder 4 egg yolks grated rind 1 lemon 2 tablespoons lemon juice 4 egg whites Make as Butter Cake and bake in buttered lemon queen pans twenty to thirty minutes. 1 cup boiling water ½ cup butter 1½ cups flour at once.
The text as printed has been scrambled in transcription: part of an adjacent recipe has drifted into the ingredient list, and the sugar and butter quantities for the cake itself are missing. What survives is a lemon variation on the book's basic Butter Cake, baked in small individual tins.
- The stray lines"1 cup boiling water, ½ cup butter, 1½ cups flour at once" — read like the opening of a cream-puff paste rather than anything in a butter cake, and appear to have drifted in from another recipe; they can be ignored here.
- What is missingThe recipe depends on the book's Butter Cake, which supplies the butter, sugar and milk. Without that base recipe in hand you have only the flavouring and leavening, so look up the Butter Cake entry before starting.
- Lemon queen pansSmall individual fancy tins of the sort sold for queen cakes; a madeleine tray or mini muffin tin is the nearest modern equivalent. Fill about two-thirds.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given, as was usual in books of this date. For small tins a moderate oven, around 350F, is a reasonable modern reading; at that heat check well before the stated twenty to thirty minutes.
- Separated eggsThe yolks and whites are listed separately, so the whites were presumably beaten and folded in last, which is what gives queen cakes their light crumb; check the Butter Cake method for the order. Fold gently and bake without delay, as the baking powder begins working once wetted.
- Baking powderTwo teaspoons is generous by modern standards. Period baking powders were single-acting, releasing their gas quickly on wetting rather than in two stages.
- Lemon rindGrate only the coloured zest; the white pith is bitter. Rubbing the zest into the sugar before creaming helps release its oil.
- YieldCannot be worked out from the page as printed, since the base quantities are missing. Like all small butter cakes, they are best the day they are baked.
"Queens" is short for queen cakes, small rich butter cakes baked in individual fancy tins that had been an English standby since the eighteenth century, usually studded with currants and sometimes shaped in hearts or shells. Lowney's Cook Book appeared in 1907, written by Maria Willett Howard for the Walter M. Lowney chocolate company of Boston. The lemon version reflects how such books were organised: one master batter, then a column of variations achieved by swapping the flavouring, which let a household get many desserts out of a single memorised proportion. The pattern is worth noting even where, as here, the printing has gone astray.