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Sponge Cake (One pound sugar one of flour)
One pound sugar, one of flour, ten eggs; stir yolks of eggs and sugar till perfectly light; beat whites of eggs and add them with the flour after beating together lightly; flavor with lemon. Three tea-spoons baking-powder in the flour will add to its lightness, but it never fails without. Bake in a moderate oven. -Mrs. Mary Reynolds, Hamilton.
— Mrs. Jennison'S Sponge Cake
One lemon, three gills flour, one pint sugar, eight eggs; beat the yolks of the eggs thoroughly, add the sugar little by little, and the grated rind of the lemon; beat the whites of the eggs to a stiff froth, and add them alternately with the flour, beating very gently and barely long enough to mix well; when part of the flour is in, add the lemon juice. Bake twenty minutes, in small loaves.-In the Kitchen.
Two versions of the same cake, one measured by weight and one by volume. Both are true foam cakes: the eggs are the leavening, and the whole thing hinges on how gently the flour goes in.
- The hinge: fold, do not stirOnce the beaten whites and flour go in, work with a spatula in as few strokes as will incorporate the flour. "Beating very gently and barely long enough to mix well" is the whole instruction. Overworking deflates the whites and gives a dense, rubbery layer at the base.
- A pound of sugar, a pound of flourBy weight that is 16 oz of each, roughly 2 1/4 cups granulated sugar and 3 1/2 to 4 cups flour. Household flour of the period was often softer than modern all-purpose, so cake flour will generally give a lighter texture.
- Gills and pintsA gill is half a cup, so Mrs. Jennison's three gills of flour is 1 1/2 cups. Her pint of sugar is a volume measure, 2 cups, about 14 oz. That is a much lighter flour-to-egg ratio than the first recipe and produces a distinctly more delicate cake.
- Moderate ovenRoughly 325 to 350F. A sponge baked too hot sets a crust before the batter has finished rising and then cracks and sinks.
- Baking powder is optional here, and was newer than you thinkBaking powder is optional here -- Mrs. Reynolds notes the cake "never fails without" it. Leave it out for a true sponge; three teaspoons in that quantity of flour will give a softer, more open, slightly cakier crumb.
- Egg sizePeriod eggs may have run a little smaller than today's large eggs, but this varied. If you weigh, ten large eggs give about 17 to 18 oz of whole egg for the first recipe and eight give about 14 oz for the second.
- Pan and timingNeither recipe gives a time for the large cake. Bake the pound-and-pound version in an ungreased tube pan for 45 to 55 minutes at 350F; the twenty minutes given for Mrs. Jennison's applies to small loaves only. Test with a skewer and cool a tube cake upside down so it does not collapse on itself.
- The lemon juice goes in lateThe recipe directs adding it partway through the flour. The grated rind carries most of the flavor; the juice mainly sharpens it.
- YieldThe first recipe makes a large tube cake serving twelve to sixteen. The second makes roughly two small loaves or a dozen individual cakes.
Sponge cake belongs to the era before chemical leavening, when lift came entirely from air beaten into eggs, and recipes were built on simple weighed ratios a cook could remember: a pound of sugar, a pound of flour, ten eggs. Its survival into Buckeye Cookery (first published in Ohio in 1877) alongside the newer baking-powder cakes shows a kitchen in transition, and Mrs. Reynolds's aside that the cake "never fails without" reads as a quiet defense of the older method against a fashionable new product. The book's habit of printing several versions of a dish under the names of the women who submitted them, with an occasional credit to a printed source such as In the Kitchen, was standard for community and church cookbooks of the period; the recipes were gathered from members rather than written by a single author, and the attributions functioned as both a credential and a courtesy.