Auntie's Cakes
INGREDIENTS.- 1 lb. of flour, 2 teaspoonfuls of bakingpowder, 2 lemons, 1/2 lb. of pounded sugar, lb. of butter, 4 eggs, a little salt. AVERAGE COST, for this quantity, 1s. 7d.
Mince the peel of the lemons finely, put it into the dry ingredients, and mix together. Beat the butter to a cream, add it to the eggs well beaten, stir well together, then drop the mixture into small buttered patty-pans, and bake 5 minutes in a quick oven.
TIME.-5 minutes.
A plain lemon bun mixture from the era when chemical raising agents were still new enough to be worth naming in the ingredient list. The text as printed has two gaps — a missing butter weight and a missing instruction — that need filling before you start.
- The missing butter weightThe line reads "lb. of butter" with the fraction dropped in printing. Given the 1/2 lb of sugar and 1 lb of flour, 8 oz is the most likely reading, but it is an editorial judgement, not a stated quantity.
- Combine the two mixturesThe method creams butter, beats it with the eggs, then stops. The floured, lemon-peel-scented dry ingredients must be folded into that wet mixture before it goes into the tins. Fold only until no dry flour shows; a beaten-out batter gives tough, close-grained buns.
- Five minutes is far too shortSmall cakes of this size in a hot oven take 12 to 18 minutes, not five. Bake until the tops spring back and a skewer comes out clean. The original timing looks like a compositor's error or a much smaller patty-pan than we now use.
- A quick ovenBroadly 400-425F (200-220C). At the lower end you get an even rise without the edges catching before the centre sets.
- Pounded sugarSugar broken from the loaf and crushed fine — modern caster sugar is the direct equivalent. Granulated will leave a gritty crumb in a mixture this short of liquid.
- Patty-pansShallow tinned pans for individual cakes, close to a modern 12-hole bun or shallow muffin tray. Butter the tins well, as directed.
- The lemonsOnly the peel is called for. Mince it very finely or grate it — chunks of pith will taste bitter. The juice of one lemon can go into the egg mixture if you want the flavour forward, though the recipe does not ask for it.
- YieldAbout 24 to 30 small cakes from a pound of flour. They stale quickly, as all butter-and-egg small cakes do, and are best the day they are made.
Small cakes baked in patty-pans were the everyday sweet of the Victorian household — quick to mix, quick to bake, and made from stores any kitchen already held. What gives this one a rough date is the baking powder: commercial chemical raising agents reached British kitchens in the middle of the nineteenth century, and self-raising flour is generally traced to Henry Jones of Bristol in the 1840s. Before that, a cake of this kind depended entirely on beaten eggs or on a yeast batter left to prove for hours, so two teaspoonfuls of powder represented a genuine change in what a cook could produce between other tasks. The name is domestic rather than descriptive, and Beeton's compilations absorbed a great many recipes contributed by readers and household correspondents.