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Lemons
One cupful of sugar, one-half cup of butter, rind and juice of one lemon, one teaspoonful baking powder, one cupful of flour.
This entry is a bare ingredient list in the style of many turn-of-the-century books, where the method was assumed to be common knowledge. Read it as a formula rather than a set of directions, and note where it is genuinely incomplete.
- The recipe as printed is unfinishedThere is no method, no oven, no pan and no liquid or egg. One cup sugar, half a cup butter, one cup flour and a lemon will not come together into a batter on their own. Many lemon cakes of this size in period books include eggs; whether eggs were omitted here in error or the entry is simply abbreviated cannot be told from the text.
- Creaming is the assumed techniqueCreaming is the likely assumed technique -- A list that opens with sugar and butter and ends with flour and baking powder is consistent with the creaming method: beat the butter and sugar until pale, work in the lemon rind and juice, then fold in the flour sifted with the baking powder. The recipe itself gives no instruction.
- Butter was unsalted and often wetterButter varied -- Farm and dairy butter of the era varied in salt and in water content; much of it was salted for keeping. Modern unsalted butter at room temperature is a reasonable substitute; if using salted, leave out any extra pinch.
- Baking powder strengthOne teaspoon to one cup of flour is an ordinary ratio, then and now. Modern double-acting powder releases part of its lift in the oven rather than all at once in the bowl, so the behaviour of the batter will differ from the original even at the same measure.
- Lemon rind means zest onlyGrate the coloured outer layer and stop at the white pith, which is bitter. One lemon yields roughly a tablespoon of zest and two to three tablespoons of juice, and the acid will react immediately with the baking powder, so get the mixture into the oven promptly.
- Oven temperatureThe recipe gives none. For a small butter cake of this kind, a modern oven at around 350F is a sensible starting point.
- YieldOne cup of flour makes a very small cake, roughly a single six-inch layer or eight to ten little cakes in patty tins.
Lemons ran through nineteenth-century American cookery as flavouring far more than as fruit: rind and juice were a common way to lift a plain butter cake, a pudding sauce or a cornstarch mould, and citrus reached American kitchens by rail and steamer from Sicily, Florida and, increasingly by 1900, California. The terseness of the entry is characteristic of the period's compiled cookbooks, which gathered contributed formulas from many hands and often printed the proportions much as submitted, on the assumption that the reader already knew what to do with a cup of sugar and half a cup of butter.