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Lemon Cake (One and one-half cups sugar)
One and one-half cups sugar, one of butter, two and one-half of flour, five eggs beaten separately, four tea-spoons sweet milk, teaspoon cream tartar, half tea-spoon soda. For Jelly. Take coffee-cup sugar, two table-spoons butter, two eggs, and the juice of two lemons: beat all together and boil until the consistency of jelly. For orange cake use oranges instead of lemons. Miss Minnie Brown.
A rich layer cake with a lemon curd filling, written in the shorthand of an 1880s community cookbook: no pan size, no oven heat, no baking time. The filling is where the recipe can fail, so start there.
- The filling is a lemon curdWhisk the sugar, butter, eggs and juice together and cook over low heat or a water bath, stirring constantly, until it coats a spoon — around 170F. "Boil" here means thicken; a hard boil scrambles the eggs and you get sweet lemon curds instead of jelly.
- Cup of butterOne cup of butter is 8 oz / 226 g, two sticks. Have it soft enough to cream properly with the sugar, since the eggs go in separated and the whites are the only real lift beyond the leavening.
- Coffee-cupPeriod usage was inconsistent; a coffee-cup was most often reckoned at about a standard cup, though some sources make it larger and some smaller. Between 3/4 and 1 cup of sugar will both work for the filling; the smaller amount gives a sharper curd.
- Four teaspoons of milkWhether this is as intended or a printer's slip for tablespoons cannot be settled from the page. Taken as written, the batter will be thick and heavy, close to a pound cake, with the eggs and beaten whites carrying the moisture. Resist adding much more liquid.
- Cream of tartar and sodaOne teaspoon cream of tartar with half a teaspoon soda is the homemade equivalent of roughly one and a half to two teaspoons of baking powder. Sift both through the flour, and get the batter into the pans promptly — the acid and soda start working on contact.
- Eggs beaten separatelyYolks into the creamed butter and sugar, whites whipped to soft peaks and folded in last, alternating with the flour. Folding, not beating, at that stage.
- Pans and ovenDivide between three greased and floured 8- or 9-inch round layer pans. The recipe gives no oven heat or time; 350F is a reasonable modern setting, with 20 to 25 minutes, until the layers spring back and pull slightly from the sides.
- Assembly and keepingCool the layers and the curd completely before spreading, or the filling runs. Makes one three-layer cake, 10 to 12 servings; because the filling is egg-based, keep the finished cake refrigerated and eat within three days.
Lemon jelly cake — a common nineteenth-century American name for a layer cake filled with cooked lemon curd — appears frequently in Southern and Midwestern books of the period, including The Dixie Cook-Book, compiled in the 1880s. The "jelly" is not fruit preserve but the older sense of the word: something cooked to a set, here eggs, sugar, butter and citrus. Cakes of this kind relied on cheap refined white sugar and on chemical leavening, which many cooks still bought as separate cream of tartar and soda even after pre-mixed baking powder was commercially available. The attribution to Miss Minnie Brown is typical of the book's construction: community and subscription cookbooks of the era were commonly assembled from recipes credited to named local contributors. The closing note that oranges may be substituted suggests a single technique, varied by whatever citrus was at hand.