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Lemon Jelly Cake
Cream together one cup of butter and two of fine sugar; add four well-beaten eggs, one-half pint of milk, one teaspoon of soda dissolved in the milk, and two teaspoons of cream of tartar, sifted in three cups of flour. Bake in layer cake tins in a quick oven. See chapter on Cake Fillings and Frostings.
A plain butter layer cake leavened the pre-baking-powder way, meant to be split and stacked with a cooked lemon filling from elsewhere in the book. The measurements translate cleanly; the leavening and the oven need a word.
- Soda and cream of tartarOne teaspoon of soda with two of cream of tartar is homemade baking powder, and the ratio here is generous for three cups of flour. Four teaspoons of modern double-acting baking powder sifted with the flour gives the same lift with less risk of a soapy, metallic edge.
- Work quickly once mixedCream of tartar and soda react on contact with the milk, and the old formula has no slow-acting second phase. Get the batter into the tins and into the oven without pausing.
- A quick ovenPeriod usage points to something in the region of 400-425F, which suits shallow layers in thin tins. In a modern oven with heavier pans, 375F for 18-22 minutes bakes the layers through without drying the edges.
- Half a pint of milkOne cup. Whole milk is closest to what the book assumed.
- A cup of butter8 oz, two American sticks, 225 g. Salted butter is fine here; the recipe adds none.
- FlourThree cups of soft turn-of-the-century flour is roughly 12-13 oz. Sift before measuring, and all-purpose flour cut with a few tablespoons of cornstarch comes nearer the original crumb than bread-strength flour.
- Yield and assemblyRoughly three 9-inch layers or four 8-inch ones. Cool the layers fully before spreading the filling.
- The filling it points toA nineteenth-century lemon jelly filling is usually a cooked lemon curd thickened with egg and sometimes a little cornstarch or flour rather than a set gelatin. Cook it until it thickens and the eggs are properly cooked, following the book's own filling chapter.
Lemon jelly cake belongs to the great age of American layer cakes, roughly 1870 to 1910, when cheaper chemical leavening and mass-produced tinned bakeware put a stacked cake within reach of more households. "Jelly" here appears to mean the filling rather than gelatin: a thick cooked lemon custard spread between layers, the same idea as a jelly cake made with raspberry preserve. The soda-and-cream-of-tartar leavening suggests a formula whose ancestry predates the general use of packaged baking powder, though such recipes persisted in print well after the boxed product was widely available. Butterick, a pattern company, also published cookbooks and domestic manuals aimed at the same middle-class housekeeper who bought its dress patterns.