Jelly Roll
3 eggs. 1 cupful sugar. 1 cupful flour. 1 teaspoonful cream of tartar. 1/2 teaspoonful soda, dissolved in milk. Bake in pie-pans, spread with acid jelly, roll up in a compact form.-Mrs. R.
A bare-bones sponge from a book that assumed its readers already knew how a cake behaved. Two things are missing from the text and both matter: the oven temperature and the fact that the cake must be rolled while it is still hot.
- Roll it hotThe hinge of the whole recipe. Turn the baked sheet out onto a sugared cloth, spread the jelly at once, and roll while the crumb is still flexible. A sponge left to cool flat will crack along every fold when you try to roll it.
- "Pie-pans" means shallow, not deepIn 1879 this meant thin round tins, and the batter was spread thin so it baked fast. A modern 10x15-inch rimmed sheet lined with parchment does the same job and gives a longer, neater roll.
- Oven temperatureNone is given. A thin sponge of this type wants a fairly quick oven, around 400F, for 8 to 12 minutes: baked just until the top springs back. Longer drying makes it brittle and unrollable.
- Cream of tartar and sodaTogether these are homemade baking powder. One teaspoon cream of tartar with half a teaspoon soda is in the same range as a couple of teaspoons of modern baking powder, though the old pairing acts immediately, so get the pans in the oven promptly.
- The milk is unmeasuredThe soda is only being dissolved, not the batter thinned. A tablespoon or two is the intent; the original gives no figure, so treat it as a splash rather than a liquid ingredient.
- No butter, no leavening from fatThere is no fat in the list, so much of the structure comes from eggs and sugar beaten until pale and thick enough to fall in a ribbon, with the flour folded in and the soda and cream of tartar adding lift. Beat the eggs hard and stop folding as soon as the flour disappears.
- "Acid jelly"Currant, quince, crabapple or tart plum, chosen so the sharpness cuts the sugar in the cake. Whatever you use, stir or warm it briefly so it spreads without tearing the hot crumb; a stiff set jelly dragged across the surface will pull it apart.
- YieldBaked as a single sheet, one roll of eight to ten slices; note that the original specifies 'pie-pans', plural. Best the day it is made; the sponge stales quickly with little fat in it.
Housekeeping in Old Virginia, compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree and published in 1879, gathered contributions from a wide circle of Virginia housewives, which is why so many entries end with an initial rather than a name. "Mrs. R." writes as one experienced cook to another: no oven temperature, no baking time, no rolling instructions, because none of that was thought to need saying. Rolled jelly cakes appear in American and British cookbooks through the second half of the nineteenth century under several names, jelly roll in the United States and Swiss roll in Britain, the latter generally traced to no particular Swiss origin at all. The rise of the form owes something to two developments of the period: reliable chemical leavening, here in the older cream-of-tartar-and-soda pairing rather than commercial baking powder, and the household stock of homemade tart jellies that a Virginia larder in autumn would hold in quantity.