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Lemon Butter. Baker's Way
Good for pies, jelly cakes, tarts, turnovers, etc. 5 or six lemons. 1 pound of sugar. 1 cupful of water. 2 ounces of butter. 2 ounces of flour. 6 eggs. Set the water on to boil with the grated lemon rinds and juice in it, and the butter. Mix flour and sugar together dry, beat them in the boiling liquor then add the eggs and stir over the fire 10 minutes.
Lemon Tarts without Fruit. 6 ounces of bread or cracker crumbs. 1 quart of water. 1 pound of sugar. 1 rounded teaspoonful of tartaric acid. 2 tablespoonfuls of lemon extract. 5 eggs or ten yolks for richer color.
Mix all the ingredients together cold. The imitation of lemon mixture is very close, and the pie is better than the real that is sometimes made with green and bitter lemons.
Two fillings from a working bakery: a real lemon curd thickened with flour, and a cheap "mock lemon" built on crumbs and tartaric acid. Both are meant to be spread into baked shells or between cake layers rather than eaten from the pan.
- The hinge: add the eggs off the heatThe original says to beat the eggs into boiling liquor and stir ten minutes. Pull the pan from the burner first, whisk a ladle of the hot mixture into the beaten eggs, then return everything to low heat. Straight into boiling syrup the eggs will scramble in seconds and no amount of stirring will smooth them.
- Weights in cupsA pound of sugar is about 2 1/4 cups granulated. Two ounces of butter is 4 tablespoons; 2 ounces of flour is a scant 1/2 cup.
- Ten minutes means thickened, not timedWith flour in it the mixture needs to reach a full simmer to lose the raw-starch taste, but keep it at a lazy bubble and stir constantly to the corners of the pan. It is done when it mounds on the spoon.
- Grated rindTake only the coloured zest; the white pith underneath is what makes a filling bitter. Five or six lemons gives roughly a cup of juice, so adjust to that if your fruit is large.
- StrainingThe hot filling can be pushed through a sieve to catch bits of zest and any thread of cooked egg. It also removes the last of the flour lumps and gives a filling that slices cleanly.
- Tartaric acid in the second recipeStill sold for winemaking and baking, and somewhat sourer than citric acid weight for weight. Taste the cold mixture before it goes into shells, since there is no fruit to balance it.
- Crumbs and bodySix ounces of bread or cracker crumbs give the mock filling much of its body, along with the eggs, and it must bake to set. Use plain unsalted crumbs and let the mixture stand before filling, or the crumbs swell in the shell and leave a watery layer beneath.
- Baking and yieldFillings of this kind bake in a moderate oven until just set and barely trembling at the centre. The lemon butter makes enough for about two 9-inch pies, or filling for three or four jelly cakes; the second recipe, built on a quart of water, makes appreciably more. The lemon butter keeps several days covered in the refrigerator.
"Lemon butter" was one of several American bakery terms for what English cookery calls lemon curd or lemon cheese - butter, sugar, eggs and lemon cooked to a spread - and the addition of flour here is the professional's touch, since starch makes the filling stable enough to sit in a case for a day without weeping. The second recipe belongs to a whole genre of turn-of-the-century mock fruit fillings, alongside mock cherry and vinegar pie, which existed because lemons were seasonal, expensive in inland towns, and often shipped underripe. Tartaric acid supplied the sourness, commercial lemon extract the aroma, and cracker crumbs the body; that a trade manual could claim the imitation was better than the real thing says a good deal about the quality of fruit reaching a small-town shop. Bakers' books of the period are frank in this way, printing the honest version and the economical one side by side and letting the shop decide.