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Four Eggs (Quarter of a pound of Castor)
Quarter of a pound of Castor Sugar.
Two ounces of Vienna Flour.
Two ounces of Potato Flour.
One teaspoonful of Baking-powder.
This is a proportions list rather than a full method — the working instructions belonged to the surrounding text in the original book. What survives is a classic whisked sponge formula, and it can be read and used as one.
- What the title meansThe heading is the ingredient list continuing: four eggs and a quarter pound (4 oz, about 115 g) of castor sugar. Four eggs against only 4 oz of combined flours is the signature ratio of a light whisked sponge rather than a butter cake.
- Castor sugarSuperfine or caster sugar, ground finer than granulated so it dissolves in the whisked eggs without weighing down the foam. Granulated sugar pulsed briefly in a food processor is the usual substitute.
- Vienna flourA finely dressed white wheat flour associated with the Austro-Hungarian roller mills whose product became a byword for fine baking in Britain from the 1870s. It is not sold under that name today; ordinary plain (all-purpose) flour is the practical stand-in.
- Potato flourHere this means potato starch, not the dense modern potato flour ground from whole dried potato. Starch replaces half the wheat flour to cut gluten and give the crumb its short, dry, melting texture.
- Baking powder in a spongeA teaspoon in 4 oz of flour is a generous dose for a cake already leavened by whisked eggs, and may have been insurance against a sponge that failed to rise, though the book does not say so. The eggs will do most of the lifting if they are whisked over warm water to the ribbon stage.
- OvenThe recipe specifies no oven. As a modern suggestion, a sponge of this size suits a moderate oven, around 350F / 180C; hotter tends to set the crust before the centre rises, giving a domed, cracked top.
- Tin and yieldFour eggs and 4 oz of flour fill a single 7- to 8-inch round tin, or two shallow sandwich tins, and bake in roughly 20-30 minutes depending on depth. It serves six to eight.
- The missing methodNothing here tells you the order of work. Treat it as a plain whisked sponge (no butter is listed): whisk eggs and sugar until thick and pale, sift the two flours with the baking powder, and fold in with as few strokes as will combine them.
Sponge formulas built on equal weights of egg and sugar with a much smaller weight of flour run through nineteenth-century British confectionery books, and the addition of potato starch marks this one as a later, more refined version — starch dilutes the gluten and produces the fine, dry crumb wanted for fancy cakes that would be split, filled and iced. The reference to "Vienna flour" suggests the book belongs after the Viennese milling and baking vogue that swept Britain from the 1870s onward, when Austrian roller-milled white flour and Vienna bread were bywords for quality among high-class cooks. That this entry appears as a bare list of quantities may itself be typical of the genre: such books, it is often said, presumed a cook already trained in the technique, who needed the proportions and nothing more.