Queen Cake
Whites 6 eggs 1¼ cups powdered sugar 1½ teaspoons lemon juice Cream the butter, add flour gradually, mixed and sifted with soda, then add lemon juice. Beat whites of eggs until stiff; add sugar gradually, and combine the mixtures. Bake fifty minutes in a long shallow pan. Cover with Opera Caramel Frosting. 1 lb. butter 1 lb. sugar Yolks 10 eggs
A white butter cake of the classic Boston Cooking-School type: creamed butter and flour, meringue folded in at the end, baked in a sheet and iced. A few things need translating before it behaves in a modern kitchen.
- The ingredient list is incompleteAs printed, the quantities for butter, flour and soda are not given, and the method calls for all three. Use a tested white-cake formula for the proportions rather than guessing; the useful part of this entry is the handling, not the amounts.
- Powdered sugarIn 1896 "powdered sugar" meant finely ground granulated sugar, not the cornstarch-cut confectioners' sugar sold today. Superfine (caster) sugar is the correct substitute, and it dissolves properly into the beaten whites.
- Soda, not baking powderThe soda is there to react with the lemon juice. On its own, with no other acid in the batter, it gives very little lift, which is why the meringue does the real work.
- Oven temperatureThe recipe gives none, only a time. A butter cake of this type is normally baked around 350F. In a shallow sheet pan, fifty minutes at that heat will likely overbake it; start checking at 30 to 35 minutes, or drop to 325F if the top is colouring early.
- The hinge: folding, not beatingOnce the stiffened whites go in, combine only until no streaks remain. The batter is stiff from creamed butter and flour, so add a spoonful of meringue first to slacken it, then fold the rest through in two additions.
- "A long shallow pan"A 9x13-inch pan is a reasonable modern stand-in. Butter and line it; a cake this rich sticks.
- Opera caramel frostingA separate recipe elsewhere in the book, of the boiled-frosting type: syrup cooked to the soft-ball stage, then beaten until it thickens. Spread it while still warm and pourable.
- YieldA 9x13 sheet cuts into 20 to 24 squares.
Queen cake is an English name that long predates this book: eighteenth-century receipts describe small rich cakes, often flavoured with rosewater and mace and studded with currants, baked in little tins that were frequently heart-shaped. By the time it reached the Boston Cooking-School it had shed the spice and dried fruit and become what an American cook of the 1890s wanted, a plain white butter cake raised largely by egg whites and finished with a boiled frosting. The split of the eggs is the period's real signature: whites went into the pale cakes, and the yolks were banked for gold cake, custards and boiled frostings, which is exactly the sort of household bookkeeping Fannie Farmer's cake chapter takes for granted.