Queencake Pans

I'm very fortunate to have a friendly neighborhood tinsmith who likes experiments. 

Thus, queencake pans:

The pans are both numerous and shiny.

Sources for this project were both informative, and less common than I expected. I couldn't find any contemporary (c.1840-1865) illustrations of them, as are sometimes found in Beeton's or the other household books. In fact, the only historic illustration I could find was this from 1907: 

Queen Cake Pans from Saleable Shop Goods (London, 1907)

Written sources are a bit more plentiful, though again most receipts only say to use queencake pans, without describing them in great detail. Put all together, we know that the tins:

• Come in multiple sizes
• One of those sizes has an average volume of ~1.5-2 cups
• Various shapes are used, including round and oval
• Most queencake receipts give a thick batter, and are expected to double in size while cooking

Miss Leslie's Seventy-Five Receipts for Pastry, Cakes, and Sweetmeats (1828) specifies that oval or round pans are best, and gives a queen cake receipt which calls for ~12 such pans; it uses 1 lb of flour, 1 pound butter, 14 oz sugar, and 10 eggs. The pans are to be filled about half-way. This advice is repeated verbatim in other books, as late as The American Family Cook Book (1860). [Compared to similarly sized cake receipts I've made, this suggests each queencake pan should bake about 5/6 cup batter, or that the total volume of each tin is 1.67-2 cups. As noted below, though, contemporary pans apparently came in a few different sizes.]

The complete Biscuit and Gingerbread Baker's Assistant (1854) calls for "some oval, round or other shaped small pans, similar to Queen's cake pans but rather deeper".  

The Practical Cook Book (1860) has three queencake recipes, one calling for rounds and two for tins. One of the tin receipts mentions rolling out the "paste" and spreading it 1/8" thick on the bottom of the tins (implying a very thick dough rather than a liquid batter).

An 1842 catalog of tin and japanware lists "Small, medium, and large" queencake tins.

The Saleable Shop Goods bakery manual (linked above) gives two sizes of queencake, the larger priced twice as high as the smaller.

Two sizes of the replica tins. In real life,
the short tins are also noticeably smaller in footprint.

For construction and detailed size information, I searched my usual material culture archives. None of the U.S. museums I checked had queencake pans or tins mentioned. Fortunately, the UK National Trust online collections came through with several sets. None are dated, but they show an array of shapes including some set combinations; some include dimensions, and most of the pictures are close enough to show construction techniques (some even mention the edge/corner construction in their descriptions!

These pans include a pair of square tins made "with rolled over edges and chamfered corners on the bases", and another set of five pans: an oval, a crescent, a clover, a diamond, and a triangle. Other lone shapes are a hexagon, kite, and heart. I also found another square, crescent, and two different triangles

Construction details. 

This was an interesting find. According to the expert, these style of folded and chamfered joins are easier and cheaper than a soldered join or wire edge. Experimentally, most of the tins hold water short term (say, while washing them), but won't contain a thin liquid indefinitely (as when a receipt calls for way too much butter so that the batter melts into a pool of butter with some sad currants at the bottom).
Even the shapes with sharp corners (like the diamond above) which have tiny holes in some of their corners are capable of containing the thick queencake batter while baking. 

Note on patty pans: this isn't a case of British and American English diverging. I've found queencake tins and patty pans named in cookbooks on both sides of the Atlantic. For example, Walsh's The Manual of Domestic Economy (1857) refers to patty pans of different sizes and shapes, but does not include any among its illustrations. Mrs. Rundell's Domestic Cookery (1859) mentions baking in small and very small patty pans, and has one receipt which call for "small moulds, patty pans, or saucers." Esther Copley's The Cook's Complete Guide (1810) mentions patty pans for making tarts, tartlets, and individual cheesecakes; The American Family Cook Book  (1859) does as well. I haven't found a definite answer for how queencake tins and patty pans differ, though the illustrations in Beeton suggest patty pans have sloped sides where queencake tins in the 1907 illustration have straight ones (miniature pie pans versus cake pans). The sources indicate that patty pans are small, come in different shapes and sizes, may have lids (?), and can be about the size of a saucer, tea cup, or half a soup plate in volume. This tracks pretty closely to I could find about queencake tins as far as size and shape. 

As for surviving patty pans, the only American museum example I found so far had no picture, description, or dimensions attached. The Museum of London and UK National trust again came though, the latter with several large sets of identical pans: about 90 of these 9cm diameter round pans, 24 rectangular (4.5cm x 6.5 cm); a set of 33 shallow round patty pans; an 18th century transferware patty pan; a set of 11 fluted round pans; fluted square pans, diamond-shaped pans, and more.