Lemon Queens
¾ tablespoon lemon juice Yolks 4 eggs 5 ozs. flour 1/4 teaspoon salt 1/4 teaspoon soda (scant) Whites 4 eggs Cream the butter, add sugar gradually, and continue beating. Then add grated rind, lemon juice, and yolks of eggs beaten until thick and lemon-colored. Mix and sift soda, salt, and flour; add to first mixture and beat thoroughly. Add whites of eggs beaten stiff. Bake from twenty to twenty-five minutes in small tins. 2/3 cup butter 2 cups flour (scant) ¼ teaspoon soda
A queen cake batter flavoured with lemon, baked in small tins. The ingredient list as printed here has been mangled in transcription, so read the whole thing before you start.
- The list is scrambledThe ingredients have been split and shuffled: "34 tablespoon lemon juice" is presumably 3/4 tablespoon, "14 teaspoon soda" is presumably 1/4 teaspoon, and the soda is listed twice. The flour appears twice as well, once as 5 oz and once as 2 cups (scant). By the period equivalence of about 4 oz to a cup of flour, 5 oz is roughly a cup and a quarter, so the two figures do not agree and there is no way to tell from the page which was intended.
- Missing sugarThe method says to cream the butter and add sugar gradually, but no sugar quantity survives in the list. For 2/3 cup butter and four eggs, something in the region of a cup would be usual for a creamed butter cake. The omission is genuine, not a conversion problem.
- Missing lemon rindThe method calls for grated rind; none is listed. The rind of one lemon is the usual amount, and it carries most of the flavour, since the juice here is under a tablespoon.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given at all. For small cakes of this kind a modern equivalent would be a moderate oven, in the region of 350-375F, for the twenty to twenty-five minutes stated.
- Small tins"Small tins" means individual patty or queen-cake tins, close in size to a modern muffin cup though usually shallower. With the sugar missing and the flour given two ways, the yield cannot be worked out from the page; it will depend on the size of tin used.
- Soda without acidA quarter teaspoon of soda has only the scant tablespoon of lemon juice to work against, which is not much acid for the quantity of batter. Much of the lift here comes from the four stiffly beaten whites, so fold them in with a light hand and get the cakes into the oven promptly.
- Butter weight2/3 cup of butter is about 5 1/3 oz, or one and a third sticks. It should be soft enough to take sugar readily but not melted, or the creaming will not hold air.
Queen cakes are an English small cake of long standing, baked from a rich creamed butter batter in individual tins, often heart- or diamond-shaped, and they turn up in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century English receipt books well before American ones. The batter is the constant and the flavouring is the variable, which is why this one is filed simply as "Lemon Queens." Their persistence reflects how useful a small cake was in a household without reliable oven control, since a shallow tin bakes through quickly and evenly where a large loaf could scorch.