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Confederate Sponge Cake
1 cupful white sugar. 2 cupfuls sifted flour. 1/2 1/2 cupful cold water. 3 eggs. One teaspoonful yeast powder in the flour; flavor to the taste. Mix yolks and sugar, then add the water after the whites (beaten to a stiff froth first), then the flour.--Miss S.
A lean, butterless sponge that depends entirely on beaten whites and a little chemical leavening. The original gives no pan, no oven and no time, so the numbers below are the ones that matter.
- Yeast powder is baking powder"Yeast powder" was the common 19th-century American name for the packaged baking-powder blends then coming into use. One teaspoon of modern double-acting baking powder in two cups of flour is a light hand but correct for a sponge that is already aerated by the whites.
- The order of operations is garbledAs written the sentence can be read two ways. The workable sequence is: beat the whites stiff first, beat yolks with the sugar, add the water, fold in the whites, then sift the flour and baking powder over and fold that in last. Adding flour before the whites will knock the air out.
- Fold, do not stirThis is the hinge of the recipe. With no butter and no egg-white-free batter to fall back on, everything rises or fails on how gently the flour goes in. Fold in three additions with a spatula, stopping while a few streaks remain.
- Oven temperatureThe original gives none. As a modern reconstruction, 350F is a reasonable choice; it is done when the top springs back and a skewer comes out clean, roughly 25 to 30 minutes in a loaf or 20 to 25 in a shallow tin.
- Pan and yieldThree eggs and two cups of flour make a modest cake: one 8-inch round, an 8x4-inch loaf, or about a dozen small cakes. Serves six to eight. Grease and flour the tin, or line the base with paper.
- CupfulsThe book's cup is probably near the modern 8 fluid ounces, though period cups varied; weigh if you can, at about 7 oz sugar and 8 to 9 oz sifted flour. This recipe specifies sifted flour, so a scooped cup will make the cake dry.
- Flavoring"Flavor to the taste" means about a teaspoon of vanilla, lemon extract, or grated lemon zest. Lemon suits a cake this plain better than vanilla.
- ServingThere is no fat in the crumb, so it stales within a day. Eat it the day it is made, with fruit, preserves or a spoonful of cream.
The name invites a wartime reading, though a sponge cake of this type is butterless and milkless by definition: it is plausible, if not demonstrable from the recipe itself, that such cakes were what Southern kitchens could manage under blockade, when butter and cream went first and eggs and a little sugar were often all that remained. Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1879), edited by Marion Cabell Tyree, gathered contributions from some 250 Virginia housekeepers, and its recipes were still close enough to the war years that titles like this one carried no irony — "Confederate" and "war-time" formulas are said to appear in books of the 1870s and 1880s as a kind of household shorthand for making do. The "yeast powder" here also dates the recipe: commercial baking powders spread rapidly in American kitchens through the 1860s and 1870s, and their appearance in a sponge cake, which had traditionally relied on eggs alone, marks the point where the old technique and the new tin of powder were being used together. The attribution to "Miss S." is typical of the book, which credited its many contributors by initial.