Comeback cake: anyone for a slice of lemon drizzle?
As it is named Britain’s top teatime treat, historian Annie Gray charts our love affair with this iced slice
So, 40per cent of Brits claim that lemon drizzle cake is their preferred choice of teatime treat, beating both Victoria sandwich and Chelsea buns, as well as classics such as chocolate and carrot cake, to claim the top spot in a recent survey. But when did the love affair with lemon drizzle start, and what else have we forgotten in our rush to grab the last slice?
Let’s start with the basics: lemon drizzle is really just a sponge with added zing. When cakes as we know them first started appearing on British tables, around the start of the 17th century, it was the technique of frothing egg whites until they could be used to raise a batter that really defined this new and exciting food.
We’d had sort-of-cakes for centuries, in the form of yeast-risen fruity numbers, which eventually evolved into the rich fruit cake. The sponge cake, the first recipe for which appeared in English in 1615, rapidly took off, going off in one direction to become a savoy cake (a fatless sponge, ideal for trifles), and in another to be termed a pound cake (recipes require one pound – roughly 500g – each of the four main ingredients, flour, butter, eggs and sugar). It’s from the latter that the lemon drizzle derives. It was hardly a stretch for cooks to start experimenting with new flavours.
Cakes were expensive (or at least not cheap) until the 1870s, when sugar reduced drastically in price. Warne’s Model Cookery Book, a classic middle-class compendium of the time, contains recipes for Lemon Cake, using the zest of two lemons, and A Very Rich Lemon Cake, in which the number of eggs is trebled, the amount of peel doubled – and a glass of brandy added for good measure. But what about the drizzle?
Drizzle cake, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, was first recorded as being used in America in 1969, but the idea of icing, hot or cold, being drizzled over the cake was already well-established. Modern cakes err towards a carefree “I just threw this together” kind of look, rather removed from their Victorian forebears, but the lemon icing is another trick of the era – often using lemon essence, then newly invented.
The rest of the cakes in the new poll hint at the change over the last century: the current dominance of American, oil-based mixtures over British, butter-based ones. But the flavours, even blueberry and carrot, were already about then, albeit not always in Britain. Swiss roll, Battenberg, Madeira, angel and fairy cakes, all of which feature, are essentially sponge with jam and colourings, plus a few options that aren’t technically cake, such as sticky toffee pudding.
But where is the seed cake? The gingerbread? The Eccles, the Lardy and the shortcake?
The survey questioned people about their teatime temptations – but do we all regularly stop work in the middle of the afternoon for a brew and sweet treat? Our Victorian relatives would have done, as would our grandmothers – all those Lyons Corner Houses didn’t exist for nothing. But modern life doesn’t sit well with it – beyond the constant calls to curb obesity, it’s hard to carve out space to stop for a nibble. But perhaps the power of the imagination will work, and make stale digestives into lovely lemon drizzle every afternoon of the week.