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Lemon Cakes
Crack four eggs into a small copper basin, add two ounces granulated sugar and the grated rind of one sound lemon and briskly whisk up for ten minutes; add three ounces sifted flour, gently mix with a skimmer for half minute, then add a saltspoon baking powder, one gill cream and one tablespoon melted butter; gently mix again with the skimmer for half minute. Lightly butter a small pastry pan, drop the preparation into the tin and set in the oven to bake for fifteen minutes. Remove, turn it on a table, divide into six equal parts and serve.
This is a small sponge batter enriched with cream and butter, baked flat and cut into squares rather than baked as individual cakes. The whisking is the whole recipe: everything else is a matter of not knocking the air back out.
- Whisk the eggs and sugar hardTen minutes by hand with whole eggs and only two ounces of sugar is what makes this rise; there is a mere quarter teaspoon of baking powder to help. Five to six minutes in a stand mixer on high will get you to the same pale, thick ribbon stage.
- Copper basinUnlined copper was standard equipment in professional kitchens, and copper is often said to help egg foam hold, though that effect is documented for whites rather than whole eggs. Any wide metal or glass bowl works; nothing in the recipe depends on the copper.
- SkimmerA flat perforated skimming spoon, used here as a folding tool. A large rubber spatula does the job. The two half-minute mixes are deliberately brief -- fold just until no dry flour shows.
- A gill of creamHalf a cup. Use heavy cream; the fat is part of the structure in a batter this low in sugar.
- Weights, not cupsTwo ounces sugar is about a quarter cup; three ounces sifted flour is roughly three-quarters of a cup, but flour is worth weighing since the batter has no margin for excess.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given. Treat this as a moderate oven, 350F, for a thin sponge; fifteen minutes is realistic in a shallow pan, and the cake is done when the top springs back and the edges pull from the tin.
- The pan"A small pastry pan" is presumably a shallow tin; something around an 8-inch square gives the thin layer the timing assumes. In a deep pan the batter will need longer and will not divide neatly into six.
- Yield and servingSix pieces, best the day they are made. With so little sugar they are closer to a plain tea sponge than to a modern cake, and they take well to a dusting of sugar, jam, or macerated berries.
The vocabulary here -- copper basin, skimmer, saltspoon, gill -- points to a professional or French-trained kitchen, though saltspoon and gill were also standard measures in domestic American cookbooks of the same period. The cake itself is a lemon-scented biscuit or genoise-type sponge, built on whole eggs beaten with sugar until aerated, a technique generally traced to Italian and French pastry work of the eighteenth century and long predating chemical leaveners; the saltspoon of baking powder is the one modern concession, a small insurance policy on a foam that used to have to do all the work alone. The result is called "lemon cakes" in the plural, yet baked in one pan and cut into six.