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Butter Sponge Cake
Two cups of sugar, one of butter, six eggs beaten separately, one-half cup of milk, one-half cup of water, two teaspoons of baking powder, three cups of flour. Mix butter and sugar to a cream.
Add yolks. Do not beat much. Next milk, with whites and flour last. Bake in loaf or cup cakes. - Nettie C. Moore.
A large butter cake in the pound-cake tradition, lightened with separately beaten whites and a little baking powder. The instructions are compressed even by 1900 standards, and one ingredient goes unaccounted for.
- The missing waterThe list calls for half a cup of water but the method never mentions it. Combining it with the milk and adding the two liquids together, alternately with the flour, is a reasonable reading. The original is genuinely silent on the point.
- "Do not beat much"This is the hinge. Once the yolks and then the flour go in, the batter is mixed only enough to combine — overworking develops gluten and the crumb turns tough and tunnelled. Much of the lift comes from the beaten whites, with the baking powder assisting; the whites should be folded, not stirred.
- Whites and flour lastRead literally, the whites go in before the flour, which risks deflating them as you work the flour through. Folding in roughly a third of the flour, then the whites, then the rest of the flour gives a lighter result.
- Baking powderSift it with the flour rather than adding it separately. Baking powder of 1900 was often single-acting, so batters were baked immediately; modern double-acting powder is more forgiving but the habit is still a good one.
- Oven temperatureNo temperature is given, and the recipe uses no oven term at all. Around 350F suits both forms. Butter cakes of this richness scorch at the edges before the center sets if pushed hotter.
- Pans and timingThis is a big batter — roughly 24 to 30 cupcakes, or two loaf pans. Cupcakes take about 18 to 22 minutes; loaves 45 to 70 minutes depending on pan size, tested with a skewer in the center.
- Butter and sugarOne cup of butter is two sticks, softened to about 65F so it will cream properly. Stop creaming when the mixture is pale and fluffy rather than working to a set time.
- Not a sponge cakeDespite the name there is no sponge method here — the eggs are not whipped with the sugar to build the structure, and the fat content puts it firmly among butter cakes. Expect a close, tender, buttery crumb, not the dry springiness of a true sponge.
The name may reflect a loose period use of "sponge" for cakes lightened with separately beaten whites, though this is not documented as a fixed convention. The recipe's terseness is characteristic of contributed-recipe compilations, where readers mailed in family formulas and editors printed them under the contributor's name with little standardizing. A cook of 1900 was expected to supply the oven heat, the pan size and the baking time from experience — she judged the oven by hand or by a scrap of paper browning on the floor of it, since household thermometers and reliable gas regulators were not yet common. Nettie C. Moore is one of many such names in these books, whose only surviving trace here is a cake.