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Sponge Cake (One cup sugar one cup flour)
One cup sugar, one cup flour, one teaspoon baking powder, one half lemon, three eggs, two tablespoons of milk; beat the eggs separately, and light; bake in a square tin and frost.
A minimal hot-milk-less sponge that leans entirely on beaten eggs for lift, with a teaspoon of baking powder as insurance. The order of operations is the whole recipe, since nothing else here can rescue a deflated batter.
- The hinge: fold, don't stir"Beat the eggs separately, and light" means the whites and yolks are whipped apart, the whites to soft, glossy peaks; many period sponges beat the sugar into the yolks, though this one does not say so. Fold the whites in last, in two or three additions, and stop while streaks are still faintly visible — overworking at this stage is what turns a sponge into a flat, rubbery slab.
- Oven temperatureNo temperature is given because none could be. Bake at 350F; a hotter oven domes and cracks the top before the centre sets.
- The square tinAn 8-inch square pan, greased and floured or lined on the bottom. Expect roughly 20 to 25 minutes, until the top springs back and a skewer comes out clean. The cake is thin by modern layer-cake standards — an inch or so.
- "One half lemon"Take both the juice and the grated zest of half a lemon. The zest carries nearly all the flavour; the juice alone will read as sour rather than lemony in a cake with this little liquid.
- Cup sizesPeriod cups run close to the modern 8 fl oz, but flour was scooped and settled rather than spooned. Weigh it: 4 oz (about 115 g) of plain flour to 7 oz (200 g) sugar. Cake flour gives the finer crumb the name implies.
- Baking powderTurn-of-the-century baking powders were often single-acting, so batters were rushed to the oven. With modern double-acting powder you have a few minutes' grace, but there is still no reason to let a sponge batter stand.
- Frosting"Frost" is unspecified: in books of this period it could mean either a beaten egg-white-and-sugar frosting or a plain water or lemon glace icing — confectioners' sugar beaten with liquid to a spreading consistency. Either way, ice only once the cake is fully cool.
- YieldNine to twelve small squares: cut in the pan, no layers, no assembly.
Sponge cake appears often in nineteenth-century household books, and it needs no butter — eggs do the lifting instead. Many such recipes are titled by their proportions — one cup sugar, one cup flour, three eggs — a formula a cook could hold in her head without opening the book. Baking powder alongside separately beaten eggs suggests a comparatively late recipe: commercial baking powders spread through American kitchens in the decades after the Civil War. If the book files it under Supper, that reflects a period habit rather than a modern one — the evening meal was often the light one, and a plain iced square with tea was supper food rather than dessert in the ceremonial sense.