Home › Supper › Sponge Cake (Four eggs one cupful sugar one)
Sponge Cake (Four eggs one cupful sugar one)
Four eggs, one cupful sugar, one cupful of flour, half a teaspoonful of baking powder, one teaspoonful of extract of orange. Beat the yolks and sugar together, add the flour with the powder sifted in it, then the extract, and lastly the whites whipped to a froth; bake about thirty minutes in a steady oven.
A plain four-egg sponge of the kind that recurs throughout late nineteenth-century supper chapters. The proportions work, but the method as written needs interpretation at two points.
- The hinge: fold, do not stirThe whites go in last and carry most of the lift, so they must be folded through in three additions with a light hand. The original gives no warning, and beating them in will collapse the batter into a dense, rubbery layer.
- "Whipped to a froth"Most likely soft peaks that just hold their shape rather than the stiff, dry meringue modern recipes usually call for, though the period term is not precise. Overbeaten whites will not fold in cleanly and can leave white streaks and tunnels.
- "A steady oven"Held there without opening the door. "Steady" is the operative word in a period of wood and coal ranges: the instruction is about avoiding a temperature swing rather than naming a particular heat, which the book does not give.
- Cup measuresAn American cup of the period is close enough to 8 fl oz to use as such. One cup of sugar is about 7 oz, one cup of flour about 4 to 4 1/2 oz sifted — weigh the flour if you can, since a scooped cup can run 25 percent heavy and will toughen the crumb.
- Baking powderHalf a teaspoon in a cup of flour is a light hand by modern standards, because the eggs are meant to do the work. Period baking powders were single-acting and varied in strength between brands; half a teaspoon of a current brand is a reasonable reading here, not an amount to increase.
- Extract of orangeA teaspoon of modern orange extract is assertive. Half a teaspoon plus the grated zest of an orange is one way to soften it, though the strength of the period article is not known.
- Pan and yieldNo tin is specified. This quantity suits an 8-inch round or a small loaf and serves six to eight. Thirty minutes fits a shallow pan; a deeper one will want closer to 35 to 40 minutes, and the cake is done when a skewer comes out clean and the top springs back.
- No fat, no liquidThere is no butter or milk in the formula, so the cake stales quickly and is best eaten the day it is baked, plain or with stewed fruit.
Sponge cake earns its name from its texture rather than any ingredient: a batter leavened chiefly by beaten egg, a technique European cooks had by the sixteenth century and which reached its plainest, most domestic form in nineteenth-century American and British household books. The half-teaspoon of baking powder places the recipe after commercial baking powders became widely available in the second half of the nineteenth century.