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Lemon Filling
3/4 cup water 1/4 cup sugar Juice 1/2 lemon Rind 1/2 lemon Bring these to a boil and then stir in 1/4 cup of sugar and 2 tablespoons of flour mixed together. Take from fire, add 1 egg well beaten, 1 teaspoon of butter; set back on fire until egg is set.
A flour-thickened lemon curd of the economical sort — one egg and a teaspoon of butter stretched with water — intended to be spread between cake layers. The whole thing takes about ten minutes on the stove.
- The sugar is split deliberatelyA quarter cup goes into the water at the start; the second quarter cup is mixed dry with the flour. That dry mixing is what keeps the flour from lumping when it hits hot liquid, so do not consolidate the two.
- Rind means zestGrate the yellow only, or pare it in strips and lift them out before the flour goes in. The white pith turns the filling bitter after several minutes of boiling.
- Temper the egg"Add 1 egg well beaten" to a pan just off the heat will scramble it if poured in cold and all at once. Whisk a few spoonfuls of the hot mixture into the beaten egg first, then return the whole to the pan.
- "Until egg is set"This means thickened, not curdled. Return it to low heat and stir constantly; pull it off when it coats the back of a spoon and holds a line drawn by a finger.
- Two tablespoons of flour is the bodyUnlike an all-egg curd, much of the thickening here comes from starch. The flour goes into liquid already boiling and needs to cook through, both then and when the pan goes back on the fire; undercooked flour leaves a pasty taste.
- Juice of half a lemonCall it about 1 1/2 tablespoons. Lemons vary; if yours is large, taste before adding all of it, since the sugar here is modest.
- YieldRoughly a cup to a cup and a quarter -- enough to fill a single layer of an 8- or 9-inch cake. Cool it completely before spreading or it will run out the sides.
Fillings like this one belong to the era when a layer cake was assembled at home from whatever was cheap, and lemon was among the flavourings that kept well out of season, since the fruit shipped and stored without much trouble. The flour is the tell: a proper lemon curd uses several egg yolks and a good deal of butter, while this recipe makes one egg and a teaspoon of butter do the work, with starch and water making up the difference. Community and "reliable" recipe collections of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries are full of such substitutions, printed without apology because the readers understood the arithmetic of a household budget. The same formula appears elsewhere under names like lemon cream filling.