Lemon Cake
1/2 cup butter 2 teaspoons baking powder 1½ cups sugar 1½ cups flour 3 eggs 1/4 cup milk Juice and grated rind of 1/2 lemon Beat the butter and sugar to a cream; add the beaten yolks; then alternately the milk and the sifted flour and baking powder; fold in the whites and add lemon.
A plain creamed butter cake in the standard early-twentieth-century proportions, lifted with baking powder and flavoured with half a lemon. The ingredient quantities run together in the original; read them as one line each.
- The measurementsRead "11/2" as 1 1/2 — so 1 1/2 cups sugar and 1 1/2 cups flour. Butter is 1/2 cup (1 stick, 4 oz); milk is 1/4 cup.
- Flour to sugarEqual cups of flour and sugar with only 1/4 cup milk gives a stiff, close-grained batter closer to a pound cake than a modern layer. The recipe specifies only 'sifted flour'; it does not say which kind.
- Separated eggsThe yolks go in with the creamed butter and the whites are whipped and folded last. Along with the creaming, that fold is what aerates the batter beyond the baking powder, so stop mixing as soon as no streaks show.
- Lemon lastThe juice and rind go in at the very end of mixing. Grate the zest before juicing, and use the zest of the whole half.
- Pan and ovenNo pan or oven direction is given. The quantity suits one 8- or 9-inch round or a small loaf; bake until a skewer comes out clean.
- The trailing quantitiesThe sugar, butter and milk listed after the method are not part of the cake batter; the method is complete without them. What they belong to is not stated — possibly a frosting or filling, or the start of the next recipe on the page. No procedure is given, so use a recipe you already trust.
- YieldOne single layer or small loaf, about eight to ten slices.
Loose-leaf cook books were sold as binders so that a cook could add, remove and reorder pages. The reliance on baking powder rather than beaten whites alone places the recipe in the era after chemical leaveners had become cheap and standardised, though the habit of separating the eggs and folding the whites in survives here from older practice. Lemon was a common flavouring for such cakes: shelf-stable, widely available through the citrus trade, and strong enough that half a fruit could carry a whole cake.