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Sponge Cake (Eggs Weight of in powdered)
14 eggs. Weight of 10 in powdered sugar. Weight of 6 in flour. Grated rind and juice of 1 lemon.
Beat the yolks of eight eggs very light, then add the sugar and beat again. Put in the juice and grated rind of a lemon, then the whites of fourteen eggs beaten to a stiff froth. Beat all together for fifteen minutes without cessation, stirring in the flour last, barely mixing; do not beat it. Pour into buttered moulds or shapes and bake in a hot oven. A large cake will require fully an hour for baking. If it bakes too fast on top, cover with buttered paper.--Mrs. S. T.
Sponge Cake. (Never fails.) 12 eggs. Their weight in sugar. The weight of 7 in flour. Juice of 1 lemon. 1 tablespoonful good vinegar.
Beat the whites, beat the yolks and sugar; add the whites, beat well; add the flour, and after adding it, do not beat it longer than is required to stir it in; then add the lemon and vinegar, just as you put it in the tins or moulds. When the cake is hot, lemon sauce is nice to eat with it.--Mrs. K.
Two versions of the same cake, both leavened entirely by beaten egg and both measured by weighing eggs in the shell against sugar and flour. The scale is not optional here.
- Weighing the eggsThe convention is to put the whole eggs, in shell, on one pan of the scale and match them with sugar or flour. A modern large egg runs about 2 oz in the shell, so the first recipe wants roughly 20 oz powdered sugar and 12 oz sifted flour; the second, about 24 oz sugar and 14 oz flour. Nineteenth-century eggs were often smaller, so weigh rather than convert to cups.
- Powdered sugarIn this period the term means sugar ground fine, not the cornstarch-cut confectioners' sugar sold now. Superfine or caster sugar is the closer match and dissolves into the yolks the way the recipe expects.
- The odd yolk countThe first cake is headed '14 eggs' but the method uses the whites of fourteen and the yolks of only eight, leaving six yolks over. Whether that is deliberate or a slip in the printed text cannot be told from the page; as written, the six yolks go unused. Save them for custard or lemon sauce.
- A hot ovenThe book gives no temperatures; 'hot' in period usage is generally taken as somewhere around 400F, though it cannot be pinned down. That is aggressive for a large foam cake, which is why the recipe tells you to shield the top with buttered paper. A modern baker would be safer around 325-350F for an hour or so, checking with a skewer.
- Fifteen minutes of beatingThat figure assumes a hand whisk or a rotary beater. A stand mixer on medium-high reaches the same volume in five or six minutes. Overbeating a whole-foam batter in a machine is easy, so stop when it holds a ribbon.
- The hinge: the flourBoth recipes are emphatic. Fold the flour in and stop the moment no dry streaks remain. Beating after the flour goes in knocks out the air that is the cake's only leavening and gives a tough, low, rubbery crumb.
- The vinegarA tablespoon of vinegar in Mrs. K.'s version acidifies the batter, which helps set the egg proteins a little firmer and keeps the crumb white. It goes in at the very end, as directed.
- Moulds and pansButtered tins were standard, but a foam batter climbs better up an ungreased tube pan and can be inverted to cool without collapsing.
- ServingA cake this size will serve a large table. The lemon sauce Mrs. K. recommends is not specified here, but a thickened lemon sauce is the obvious use for those spare yolks.
Sponge cake, in these two recipes at least, takes no chemical leavening at all: lift comes from egg and arm alone, and the recipes are reckoned by weighing eggs in the shell against sugar and flour, a habit inherited from English and French pastry practice. Housekeeping in Old Virginia, compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree and published in 1879, gathered contributions from named Virginia housewives, which is why two sponge cakes sit side by side under different initials, one of them staking its reputation on the parenthetical claim that it never fails. The competing versions show how such a book worked: it preserved the household knowledge of a particular circle rather than imposing a single standard, and a cook was expected to pick whichever hand she trusted. The instruction to cover the top with buttered paper is a reminder of wood- and coal-fired ovens, where the heat could not be dialed down once the cake was in.