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Cocoa Sponge Cake
2 ozs. (1/4 cup) cocoa 3 eggs 1 gill (1/2 cup) cold water 1 teaspoonful vanilla extract 2 teaspoonfuls baking powder 1 teaspoonful powdered cinnamon 1/4 teaspoonful salt 7 ozs. (1¾ cups) flour 1/4 teaspoonful grated nutmeg 1½ ozs. (1½ cups) sugar Beat up the yolks of the eggs till light, then add the water, sugar, and vanilla. Mix together the flour, nutmeg, cocoa, cinnamon, salt, and baking powder, then add them to the sugar. Fold in the whites of eggs stiffly beaten and bake in a quick oven in a buttered earthenware dish till ready.
A water-based sponge rather than a butter cake, mixed in two stages and baked in an earthenware dish. The text is lightly garbled by old typesetting, so a few numbers need reading with care.
- On the measurementsThe sugar quantity and the gill of water were checked against the printed page and read as given here; a gill is 1/2 cup, as the recipe itself notes. Weigh rather than measure where you can: 2 oz cocoa and 7 oz flour.
- Quick oven, with a caveatA "quick oven" in this period is usually taken to mean somewhere in the region of 400-450F, which will set the crust of a lean sponge before the centre rises. In a thick earthenware dish 350-375F gives a better result, and the cake is done when the top springs back and a skewer comes out clean, roughly 30-40 minutes depending on depth.
- Cocoa, not cocoa mixThis wants plain unsweetened cocoa powder. Natural (non-alkalised) cocoa is likely closer to what the book's readers would have bought; Dutch-process gives a darker, milder cake. Drinking chocolate or sweetened mix will not work at this sugar level.
- The hinge: fold, do not stirAll the lift beyond the baking powder comes from the stiffly beaten whites. Add the dry mixture to the yolk-sugar-water base until just combined, then cut and fold the whites through in three additions. Overworking at this point collapses the foam and you get a dense, rubbery slab.
- Sequence of the dry ingredientsThe instruction to "add them to the sugar" means the yolk-sugar-water mixture, not dry sugar. Cocoa absorbs a good deal of liquid, so the batter will look thick before the whites go in; that is expected.
- The earthenware dishButter it well and, if the dish is deep, line the base with parchment. Earthenware heats slowly and holds heat, so the cake continues to cook after it leaves the oven; pull it as soon as the centre tests done and cool in the dish for ten minutes before turning out.
- YieldRoughly enough batter for one 8-inch round or a 1 1/2-quart casserole, serving eight. It is improved by a dusting of icing sugar rather than a heavy frosting.
Sponge cakes made with water instead of milk or butter appear in late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century cookbooks, using no expensive fat and relying on beaten eggs for structure. Cocoa itself had not long been a cheap pantry staple, following the nineteenth-century development of presses that removed most of the cocoa butter from the bean and left a fine, storable powder. The cinnamon and nutmeg here may be a holdover from an older tradition of spicing chocolate, a habit generally traced back to the drinking chocolate of colonial Spanish America.