Geraldine O'Brien
3 eggs
ALICE WASHBURN'S SPONGE CAKE
2 level teaspoons Royal baking powder 1/2 cup water 1⅓ cups sugar 2 level cups flour 1 tablespoon lemon juice Beat well and add whites last. Bake about thirty minutes.
I love to cook, but have to keep one eye on the cook book all the time.
The page is a printer's or scanner's collision: a stray title, Baked Steak with Vegetables, has landed on top of an ingredient list that is plainly a sponge cake, and the ingredients themselves are out of order. What survives is a workable hot-water sponge, provided you supply the method the original assumes you already know.
- Ignore the steakNo meat, vegetables or fat appear anywhere in the list, and no roasting instructions follow. Treat the heading as a fragment belonging to a neighbouring entry and read the rest as Alice Washburn's sponge cake alone.
- Reading the quantitiesReading the quantities — 1 1/3 cups sugar, 2 level cups flour, 3 eggs, 1/2 cup water, 1 tablespoon lemon juice, 2 level teaspoons baking powder. "Level" signals that the measures are to be struck flat rather than rounded; the recipe says nothing about why it was specified here.
- Royal baking powderRoyal baking powder — In this period Royal was a cream-of-tartar powder, fast-acting rather than double-acting; the brand still exists but the formulation is not the same. Teaspoon-for-teaspoon substitution with a modern powder is a reasonable starting point, but get the batter into the oven promptly.
- What "beat well and add whites last" meansWhat "beat well and add whites last" means — The eggs must be separated and the stiffly beaten whites folded in at the end. The order of the remaining steps (yolks beaten with sugar, then water and lemon juice, then flour sifted with the baking powder) is a standard reconstruction rather than anything the recipe states. Fold the whites rather than stirring them.
- The waterHalf a cup of liquid in a sponge marks this as a hot-water or "quick" sponge, cheaper and more forgiving than a true whisked genoise. Some cooks of the period used boiling water; the recipe does not say, and cold water works.
- Oven temperatureNone is given. A sponge of this size wants a moderate oven, 350F, for the thirty minutes stated; test with a skewer rather than trusting the clock.
- Pan and yieldPan and yield — Neither is given. Two 8-inch layers would suit the thirty-minute bake stated; a tube pan would need longer. Any serving figure is a guess.
- What is missingThere is no salt and no flavouring beyond the lemon juice. A pinch of salt and a little grated lemon zest are consistent with the period and improve a cake that is otherwise very plain.
Celebrated Actor Folks' Cookeries gathered recipes from stage performers of the 1910s, and its charm lies in exactly the sort of thing that has happened here: contributions that occasionally ran together. Alice Washburn and Geraldine O'Brien appear to have been working actresses of the period, and a sponge cake was a natural thing for either to send in eing cheap, keeping reasonably well, and requiring no icing. Cookbooks of this kind also carried commercial weight: naming Royal baking powder rather than simply "baking powder" was common practice in American recipe collections of the era, when the chemical leavening companies published their own booklets. O'Brien's aside — that she loves to cook but keeps one eye on the cookbook — is the honest note of a celebrity contributor who was not pretending to be a professional.