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Vanilla Spongecake
Cut half a stick of vanilla into small pieces, tie them in muslin, and put them into a saucepan with one gill of water and twelve ounces of refined sugar. Simmer these to a clear syrup, then take out the bag of flavouring, and stir the syrup into six eggs lightly beaten. Put the basin containing this mixture into a saucepan of boiling water over the fire. Draw the pan back and beat the batter briskly and continuously till thick and light. Stir in off the fire half a pound of flour, turn the batter into prepared moulds, and bake in a quick oven. Time to bake, half an hour or more.
This is a hot-syrup sponge in the pain de Gênes family: no baking powder, no butter, and no fat of any kind. Everything depends on how much air the eggs hold, so read the beating instruction as the whole recipe.
- The hinge: beat to the ribbon stageThe egg-and-syrup mixture is the only leavening. The recipe has the basin sitting in the pan of boiling water, drawn back from the fire, while you beat; keep beating briskly and continuously until the batter is thick and light and a lifted whisk leaves a ribbon that sits on the surface for a few seconds. Stopping short gives a dense, rubbery cake that no oven can rescue.
- A gillAn imperial gill is a quarter of a pint, five fluid ounces. With twelve ounces of sugar (about 1 1/2 cups) that makes a heavy syrup; the recipe asks only that it be simmered to a clear syrup.
- Weights, not cupsHalf a pound of flour is 8 oz, about 1 3/4 cups spooned and levelled. Plain flour is right; the recipe wants no raising agent. Sift it and fold in three additions with a spatula, not a spoon.
- Half a stick of vanillaA "stick" is a whole pod, so this is half a bean. Split it lengthwise before tying it in muslin — the seeds and inner surface carry most of the flavour. Two teaspoons of extract stirred into the cooled syrup is a fair substitute, but add it off the heat or it will flash off.
- "Refined sugar"In Cassell's day this generally meant white loaf or lump sugar, broken and weighed. Ordinary granulated sugar is a reasonable modern equivalent.
- A quick oven, with a caveatA quick oven is usually reckoned at around 400-425F. For a single 8- or 9-inch tin, 350-375F for 30-35 minutes gives a cake that rises evenly instead of doming and cracking; the recipe itself allows half an hour or more. It is done when the top springs back and the sides begin to shrink from the tin.
- "Prepared moulds"Butter the tin, dust it with flour or fine sugar, and line the base with paper. A fatless sponge grips badly and tears if the tin is bare. Turn it out within a minute or two of leaving the oven.
- YieldSix eggs and 8 oz of flour make roughly two 8-inch layers, one deep 9-inch cake, or about eighteen small moulds. Serves ten to twelve.
The method — a hot sugar syrup poured onto beaten eggs, whisked over water until thick, then lightened with flour — is the older, professional route to a sponge, and it is generally traced to the Savoy biscuit and génoise traditions of French pastry work rather than to the soda-and-buttermilk cakes of the domestic kitchen. It appears in a Victorian household dictionary because vanilla had by then come within reach of the middle-class larder: pods were sold by the stick from the grocer or chemist, dear enough to be used half at a time, and the recipe accordingly bags the pieces rather than infusing them loose. The absence of butter is deliberate as well as economical — a fatless sponge keeps poorly but slices cleanly, and it was the standard base for trifles, charlottes and layered cakes filled with jam or cream.