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Sponge Cake (Weight of dozen eggs in sugar)
The weight of 1 dozen eggs in sugar. The weight of 4 eggs in flour. The juice and rind of 1 lemon. Beat well, and bake quickly.--Mrs. McG.
A weight-ratio sponge in the eighteenth-century manner: no butter, no baking powder, nothing but eggs beaten to hold air. The proportions are given by the scale, so a scale is not optional.
- What the weights come toLarge eggs run about 2 oz each in the shell, so a dozen gives roughly 24 oz (1 1/2 lb) of sugar and four eggs give about 8 oz of flour. That is around 3 1/3 cups sugar and 1 3/4 to 2 cups flour for twelve eggs' worth of batter -- a very large cake. The eggs were presumably weighed whole, in the shell, against the sugar on the other pan of the balance, though the recipe does not say so.
- Halve itSix eggs, 12 oz sugar, 4 oz flour fits a standard 10-inch tube pan. The full recipe wants two pans or a very deep one.
- The hinge: the eggs are the leaveningSeparate them. Beat the yolks with the sugar until pale and thick enough to ribbon, whip the whites to firm but not dry peaks, then fold in whites and sifted flour alternately with a light hand. Any deflation here cannot be recovered later.
- "Beat well" meant a long timeWith a whisk and a shallow bowl this was fifteen or twenty minutes of work. A stand mixer gets the yolk-sugar stage there in five to eight minutes; the whites in two or three.
- "Bake quickly"A quick oven is usually reckoned somewhere around 400-425F, which suits small sponge drops but will scorch a deep cake before the centre sets. For a tube pan, 350F for 45 to 55 minutes is a workable reading of the instruction -- baked promptly, not baked hot.
- Pan preparationDo not grease the sides. An unbuttered tube pan lets the batter climb; grease and it slides back. Cool the cake upside down in the pan.
- The lemonRind means zest, grated fine, and it goes in with the yolks and sugar so the oils are released. The juice is best added at the end, once the foam is built.
- YieldThe full quantity serves sixteen to twenty. It is best the day it is made and stales fast, having no fat in it.
Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1879), compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree from contributions by Virginia housewives, is full of recipes signed only with initials, as this one is -- the book reads as a community ledger of what particular kitchens actually did. The weight-against-eggs formula is older than the book by a century or more: before reliable standardised cups, and before chemical leaveners were in general household use, a balance scale with eggs in one pan and sugar in the other was the surest way to keep the ratio right whatever size the hens' eggs happened to be. Cakes of this kind are often associated with what English manuscript books called biscuit or Savoy cake, and their rise depends entirely on beaten egg, which is why the instruction to beat well carries so much of the recipe's weight. Lemon was among the common flavourings for such cakes.