Sponge Roll
4 cupfuls of sugar. 4 cupfuls of flour. 1 dozen eggs. Mix as for sponge cake. Bake in thin sheets and spread on stewed apples, or any kind of fruit, a little sweetened; roll the sheets with the top on the outside. Serve with rich wine sauce.--Mrs. Col. S.
A jelly roll in all but name, written for a household baking on a scale few kitchens need now. The batter is a plain foam sponge with no chemical leavening, so everything depends on how much air you beat into the eggs and how little you knock out again.
- Scale it downFour cups each of sugar and flour with a dozen eggs will fill several sheet pans and yield several rolls. A quarter of the recipe — 1 cup sugar, 1 cup flour, 3 eggs — makes one standard 10x15-inch sheet and one roll serving eight.
- "Mix as for sponge cake"Beat the eggs with the sugar until pale and tripled in volume and the batter falls from the whisk in a ribbon that holds a moment on the surface, then sift the flour over in three additions and fold. There is no baking powder here; the foam is the only lift.
- Salt and flavouringThe original lists neither. A pinch of salt per cup of flour and a little lemon zest or vanilla are worth adding.
- Thin sheetsLine a rimmed sheet pan with buttered parchment and spread the batter about a quarter-inch deep. Thicker than that and the cake cracks when rolled.
- OvenThe original gives no oven direction; 375-400F for 8 to 12 minutes suits a sheet this thin. The sheet is done when it springs back and the edges just begin to pull from the pan; a minute past that and it dries out and splits.
- Roll while hotThe hinge of the whole thing. Turn the sheet out onto a sugared towel as soon as it leaves the oven, peel the parchment, and roll it up loosely in the towel. Let it cool rolled, then unroll, spread the fruit and re-roll. A cooled flat sheet will crack.
- "With the top on the outside"Roll so the baked top surface faces outward, as the original directs, with the filling against the underside.
- Stewed applesCook the fruit down until thick enough to mound on a spoon. Anything loose will soak the crumb and squeeze out at the ends as you roll.
- Rich wine sauceWine sauces in books of this period are commonly a sweetened butter-and-sugar sauce loosened with sherry or Madeira, warmed but not boiled; usually poured over the sliced roll.
Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1879), edited by Marion Cabell Tyree, collected recipes by name from Virginia households, and "Mrs. Col. S." is typical of its half-anonymous attributions — a contributor known to the compiler and her circle, identified by her husband's rank. The rolled sponge was a nineteenth-century enthusiasm on both sides of the Atlantic, appearing as jelly roll or Swiss roll depending on the book; the technique depends on nothing more than eggs beaten to a foam. The quantities here — a dozen eggs at a stroke — suit a large household kitchen with enough hands to beat them by whisk. The "rich wine sauce" suggests a dinner dessert rather than a tea cake, in a region where sherry and Madeira were sideboard staples.