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Cream Sponge Cake
4 eggs, whites and yolks beaten separately. 2 teacupfuls sugar. 1 cupful sweet cream. 2 heaping cupfuls flour. 1 teaspoonful soda.
Two teaspoonfuls cream of tartar, mixed in the flour before it is sifted. Add whites of eggs last thing before the flour, the stir that in gently, without beating. Very nice.--Mrs. F. C. W.
A plain butterless cake leavened with cream, beaten egg white and a homemade baking powder. The original assumes a cook who knows her own pans and stove, so the two things it never says — pan size and oven heat — are the two you have to supply.
- Teacupful vs. cupfulThe recipe distinguishes the two, and that is deliberate: a nineteenth-century teacup is roughly 6 fl oz, a cup 8 fl oz. Read it as about 1 1/2 cups sugar and a full 8 oz cup of cream, though the distinction was never rigid and some cooks used the words interchangeably.
- Sweet creamFresh, unsoured cream, as opposed to the sour or clabbered cream that appears elsewhere in these books. Heavy or whipping cream, unwhipped, is the right substitute; the fat in it stands in for the butter the recipe never calls for.
- Soda and cream of tartarOne part soda to two parts cream of tartar is homemade baking powder. About four teaspoons of modern baking powder is the rough equivalent of the amounts given here, but keep the original pairing if you like; it is single-acting, so the acid reacts as soon as it meets the wet batter and the cake should go into the oven promptly.
- OvenNone is specified. A moderate oven, 350F, suits this batter. Baked in a 9-inch tube pan it wants roughly 35 to 40 minutes; in two 8-inch layers, 22 to 28.
- Folding, not beatingThe instruction to stir the flour in gently without beating is the hinge. The whites and the chemical leavening are carrying the whole cake, and overworking the flour at this stage collapses the foam and toughens the crumb.
- Heaping cupfulsTwo heaping cups of flour is roughly 10 to 11 oz by weight, depending on how the flour is scooped. Weigh it if you can; a sponge-type batter with no butter is unforgiving of too much flour.
- FlavouringThere is none, which is not unusual in recipes of this kind; such a plain cake would take kindly to preserves, stewed fruit or a boiled custard. A teaspoon of vanilla or the grated zest of a lemon is an unobtrusive addition.
- YieldOne 9-inch tube cake or two thin 8-inch layers, serving eight to ten.
Housekeeping in Old Virginia, compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree and published in 1878, gathered contributions from some 250 Virginia housekeepers, which is why so many of its recipes close with a set of initials rather than a name — Mrs. F. C. W. here. By 1878 chemical leavening was long established in American cake baking: soda paired with cream of tartar had been giving a reliable lift for decades, and though packaged baking powder was already on the market it was not yet in every pantry, so cooks often measured out the components themselves. Strictly speaking this is not a sponge at all, since a true sponge is raised by eggs alone and carries no fat; "cream sponge" here signals a light, butterless cake enriched with cream, of the kind meant to be sliced plain for tea or served under whatever fruit the season offered.