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Corn-Flour Sponge Cake
Beat a quarter of a pound of butter to cream. Add half a pound of white sugar, half a pound of corn-flour, a dessert-spoonful of baking powder, and four eggs. Bake in a quick oven.
A short Victorian formula that reads as a note rather than a method — it assumes the cook already knows how a pound cake is put together. Two things need translating before you start: what corn-flour means here, and how hot to make the oven.
- Corn-flour is cornstarchIn British usage corn-flour means the white starch sold in the US as cornstarch, not cornmeal. Substituting cornmeal produces a gritty, heavy thing that is not this cake.
- Weigh, do not scoopHalf a pound of cornstarch is roughly 1¾ to 2 cups, and cornstarch packs and aerates unpredictably. Use a scale: 8 oz / 225 g starch, 8 oz sugar, 4 oz butter.
- Dessert-spoonfulAn old dessertspoon is 2 teaspoons. Given there is no wheat flour and no liquid beyond the eggs, that quantity of baking powder is doing all the lifting.
- "A quick oven"A quick oven is usually taken as somewhere around 400–425°F, which suits small cakes baked in shallow tins. For a single cake in a deep tin, that heat will set the crust before the middle cooks; a cook working a range oven could shift it to a cooler part or a lower shelf.
- Order of mixingCream the butter and sugar thoroughly, then beat in the eggs one at a time, then fold in the cornstarch and baking powder sifted together. Adding all four eggs at once, as the wording implies, will split the mixture.
- The batter is stiff and starchyWith no milk or water, the paste is thick and short. Do not overwork it after the starch goes in — cornstarch batters set dense and pasty when beaten hard at that stage.
- Yield and tinAbout 1¾ lb of batter: one 8-inch round tin, or a dozen to sixteen small cakes or patty tins. Line and grease well, since the crumb is fragile and tears coming out.
- Texture to expectBeing entirely starch, it bakes tender and slightly cottony rather than springy, and it stales quickly, so it is best eaten the day it is made. It is also, incidentally, wheat-free (check the baking powder if that matters).
Cassell's places this in the pastry and cake range at a moment when two industrial products had just become cheap and reliable in British kitchens: refined maize starch, sold from the 1850s onward under brand names as "corn-flour," and chemical baking powder. Both are generally said to have been aimed at middle-class households, and a cake made wholly of starch, needing no yeast, no long beating of eggs for lift, and no wheat, sits naturally alongside them. The result stands slightly apart from a true sponge, which raises on eggs alone; this is a creamed butter cake leaning on the baking powder, and the word "sponge" is being used loosely for a light, pale, fine-crumbed cake. Its appearance in a general dictionary of cookery suggests that the new packaged starch, often associated with invalid cookery, was by then finding a place in everyday baking.