Lemon Cake
1 cup butter 3 cups sugar 5 eggs 1 cup milk 1 tsp. soda 3½ cups flour juice and grated peal of 1 lemon
— Mrs. John Legg
Like many church-cookbook cake entries, this is a formula rather than a method: the contributor assumed her readers knew how to mix and bake a butter cake. The proportions are sound, but a few things need filling in.
- Method, since none is givenCream the butter with the sugar until pale, beat in the eggs one at a time, then add the flour and milk alternately, finishing with the lemon juice and zest. Overmixing after the flour goes in will toughen the crumb.
- The leavening is the hingeOne teaspoon of soda in sweet milk has no reliable acid to work against apart from the lemon juice, which is added last and in small quantity. If you want a dependable rise, swap the soda for baking powder, reckoning on about 3 teaspoons for this quantity of flour; if you keep the soda, dissolve it in the milk and get the batter into the oven promptly.
- OvenA cake of this size wants 325-350F; this is a heavy butter-and-sugar batter and the lower end protects the edges.
- Pan and timingThis is a large cake — roughly 8 cups of batter. Use two 9-inch loaf pans or a 10-inch tube pan, and expect 55-70 minutes. Test with a skewer in the centre.
- "Grated peal"Peel, meaning the zest. Take only the coloured outer layer; the white pith underneath is bitter. Rub the zest into the sugar before creaming to draw out more of the oil.
- No salt listedPeriod recipes often omitted it because butter was salted as a matter of course. With modern unsalted butter, add 1/2 teaspoon of salt to the flour.
- FlourThe 3 1/2 cups may have been a softer, lower-protein flour than today's all-purpose, depending on where the book was compiled. Measure by spooning and levelling, about 15 oz; all-purpose works but gives a firmer crumb.
- YieldServes 16-20. The cake keeps well for several days wrapped, and the lemon flavour deepens overnight.
Lemon cake in a book like this is a butter cake in the pound-cake line — the old equal-weights formula of butter, sugar, eggs and flour, loosened over the nineteenth century with milk and chemical leavening. Philathea cook books were fundraising collections compiled by Philathea classes, the young women's Bible-study groups that spread through Baptist and other Protestant Sunday schools from the 1890s onward; a signed recipe was both a contribution and a small claim to reputation, which is why Mrs. John Legg's name sits under it. Lemons were by then a widely available grocery item, shipped from Sicily and later California, and citrus zest was a common flavouring alongside vanilla and nutmeg.