Home › Fancy Bread and Cakes › Four Eggs (Sift and warm the flour Beat)
Four Eggs (Sift and warm the flour Beat)
Sift and warm the flour. Beat the eggs and sugar together for twenty minutes, then stir in the flour very lightly. Bake in a cake-tin lined with buttered paper in a moderate oven for one hour.
A whisked sponge of the plainest kind: no butter, no raising agent, nothing but eggs, sugar and flour held up by air. The written method assumes a cook who already knows the proportions, so the first job is to supply them.
- The missing quantitiesOnly the eggs are named. A common Victorian sponge convention is the weight of the eggs in sugar and half that weight in flour — roughly 200g/7oz sugar and 100g/3.5oz plain flour for four medium eggs. Other period sponges use other proportions, so this is a reasonable reading rather than the only one.
- Twenty minutes of beatingThat is the hinge, and it is not exaggeration for a hand whisk. A stand mixer on high reaches the same stage — pale, greatly increased in volume, holding a ribbon on the surface for several seconds — in roughly eight to ten minutes.
- Warming the flourWarming was generally explained as keeping the flour from chilling the aerated egg foam, and it also dries the flour a little. Room-temperature flour in a modern kitchen does the same job; if your kitchen is cold, a few minutes in a low oven does no harm.
- "Very lightly"Sift the flour over the surface in three additions and fold with a large metal spoon or spatula, cutting down and turning over rather than stirring. Every stroke past the point where the flour disappears costs height.
- A moderate ovenAround 350F/180C. With no chemical raising agent the cake depends entirely on the trapped air expanding, so avoid opening the door until the bake is well advanced.
- One hour is longAn hour implies a fairly deep tin, of the order of 7 inches. In a wider, shallower modern tin the same batter may be done in 30-40 minutes; test with a skewer and by the sponge shrinking slightly from the sides.
- Buttered paperBaking parchment, buttered, lining base and sides, as the recipe directs.
- YieldAbout eight modest slices. A fatless sponge dries out quickly and is best eaten within a day or so of baking.
Cakes titled by their egg count — "Four Eggs", "Twelve Eggs", the "pound cake" naming a pound of each — belong to a period when eggs were the measure and the leavening at once. Before baking powder became a kitchen staple in the second half of the nineteenth century, the only reliable lift in a fine cake came from air beaten into eggs and sugar by hand, which is why the instruction to beat for twenty minutes is stated so flatly: it was simply the work. Recipes of this sort have often been linked to the Savoy and Naples biscuits of earlier confectionery, though the relation is better described as kinship than descent, and their survival in later manuals reflects a household where a cook or kitchenmaid had the arm and the time. The brevity is not carelessness.