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Lemon Cheese for Layer Cake
Take two lemons (juice and grated rind); three eggs (yolks); one-half cup of butter; one cup of sugar. Mix all together, place on range, and cook until the mixture is as thick as sponge, stirring continually; it will thicken as it cools.
This is lemon curd under an older name, and it behaves like any egg-thickened custard: gentle heat, constant motion, and no boiling.
- The hinge: keep it below a simmerYolks begin to thicken well below boiling and will curdle if pushed, though the sugar and lemon juice raise the point at which that happens. Cook over a double boiler or on the lowest direct heat you can manage, and pull it the moment it coats the back of a spoon thickly. "As thick as sponge" means the texture of a thick batter, not a solid.
- "Place on range"On a wood or coal range the cook worked at the cool edge of the top plate. On a modern burner that translates to low, or better, a heatproof bowl over an inch of barely simmering water.
- Butter quantityHalf a cup is 4 oz / 113 g. Whisk it in a piece at a time rather than melting it all at the start; the curd emulsifies more smoothly and stays glossy.
- LemonsAim for about 1/3 cup (80 ml) juice and the zest of two lemons, and zest before juicing.
- Whites left overThe recipe uses yolks only. Three whites are the right quantity for a boiled or seven-minute frosting, though this page says nothing about what dressed the outside of the cake.
- Strain and coolPush the finished curd through a fine sieve to catch bits of set egg and coarse zest, then cool with plastic wrap on the surface so no skin forms. It firms considerably in the refrigerator.
- YieldRoughly 1 1/4 to 1 1/2 cups, enough to fill a two-layer 8- or 9-inch cake. Keep it refrigerated and use within a week.
"Lemon cheese" is the older British name for what is now sold as lemon curd, the word cheese used loosely for any thick, spreadable preserve set without rennet, as in damson cheese or the fruit cheeses served with cold meat. Curds of this kind are often traced back further, though eighteenth-century sources give lemon cheesecake fillings and printed lemon curd recipes are essentially nineteenth-century; the pairing with scones is a later association. Its appearance in a Butterick book is a reminder of who published it: Butterick sold dress patterns, and its cookbooks and household manuals were part of a mail-order world of practical instruction for American housekeepers, where a filling made from a few ingredients already in the kitchen was more useful than one calling for a specialty purchase.