Citron Cake
1/4 lb. butter. 1/2 lb. sugar. 3 eggs. 1/2 cup milk. 1/2 lb. flour 1 tablespoon brandy 1 cup citron, thinly sliced, then cut in strips 1½ teaspoons baking powder Cream the butter, add sugar gradually, yolks of eggs well beaten, milk, and flour mixed and sifted with baking powder. Beat whites of eggs until stiff, and add to first mixture, then add brandy and citron. Bake in a moderate oven one hour.
The ingredient column as printed here is incomplete — the butter, sugar, eggs and milk are named in the method but their quantities have dropped out of the text. Read the following before you start.
- Missing quantitiesOnly the flour (1/2 lb, about 2 cups), baking powder, brandy and citron survive in the list. The method calls for butter, sugar, egg yolks, milk and beaten whites with no amounts given, so the recipe cannot be followed as it stands.
- CitronThis means candied citron — the thick peel of Citrus medica, or in American kitchens of the period sometimes candied citron melon. It is sold in tubs near the glacé cherries at holiday time. Rinse off surplus syrup, dry it, and toss the strips in a little of the measured flour so they do not sink.
- A moderate ovenUsually glossed as somewhere around 350F, though the recipe gives no temperature and names no pan. For a full hour of baking a deep tin is implied; check from 50 minutes with a skewer, since the citron holds moisture and can read wet even when the crumb is done.
- Order of mixingThe whites go in before the brandy and fruit. Fold, do not beat, once the whites are in, and add the citron last with as few strokes as possible.
- The brandyOne tablespoon is for flavour, not leavening or preservation. Any decent brandy works; most of the alcohol cooks off and what remains reads as warmth against the candied peel.
- Baking powder1 1/2 teaspoons of a period powder, which would generally have been single-acting rather than the double-acting sort sold now.
- YieldProbably a single loaf. It will likely slice better the day after baking.
Citron cake belongs to the long family of English-descended butter cakes that American cookbooks multiplied by simple substitution: the same creamed batter recurs under different names, distinguished only by what is stirred in at the end. Candied citron was a staple of the nineteenth-century store cupboard, imported from the Mediterranean and, later in the century, made domestically from the hard white flesh of the citron melon — it kept indefinitely, and it gave a fruitcake character to a plain cake. Its near-disappearance from ordinary baking is a twentieth-century development; by the time most home cooks met it, it had retreated into Christmas fruitcake, which is why it now tastes archaic in a plain loaf. The tablespoon of brandy is a holdover from an older tradition of spirits in cake batter, where they served both as flavouring and, in larger amounts, as a keeping agent.