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Currant Jelly Roll
1 t baking powder (Royal) ¾ C sifted Swans Down flour ¼t salt ¾ C sifted sugar 4 egg whites, stifly beaten 4 egg yolks, beaten light Currant jelly 1 t vanilla .
Sift flour once, measure, add baking powder and salt and sift together three times. Fold sugar into egg whites, a small amount at a time. Add egg yolks and vanilla. Fold in flour gradually. Pour into pan 8½ x 13½ inches, lined with buttered paper, and bake in hot oven (400° F.) 13 minutes. Turn from pan at once onto cloth covered with powdered sugar. Remove paper. Quickly cut off crisp edges of cake. Spread with jelly and roll. Wrap in cloth until cool.
A classic sponge jelly roll of the branded-ingredient era, when flour companies supplied recipes to church cookbooks. The whole thing hinges on rolling the cake while it is still hot and pliable.
- The fractionsThe quantities are three-quarters cup sifted cake flour, three-quarters cup sifted sugar, one teaspoon baking powder and a quarter teaspoon salt, with four eggs separated.
- Swans DownA soft winter-wheat cake flour, still sold. Any cake flour works; all-purpose gives a tougher, less tender sheet. Do not substitute self-rising.
- Sift, measure, sift againSifting before measuring is not fussiness in a sponge with no fat. It aerates the flour and keeps the folded batter from deflating when the dry ingredients go in.
- Oven and pan400°F is correct and the 13 minutes is short by design. Modern jelly-roll pans run about 10x15 inches; the 8½x13½ pan called for gives a thicker cake. It is done when the top springs back and the edges just pull from the sides.
- Parchment for buttered paperButtered paper meant butter-brushed kitchen or waxed paper. Parchment does the job with less risk of sticking, but still butter it.
- Roll it hotThe single instruction that matters. Turn out, peel the paper, trim the crisp edges and roll within a minute or two. A cooled sponge cracks along the outer curve and cannot be repaired.
- The jellyWarm and stir the currant jelly briefly so it spreads thin without tearing the crumb. Cold jelly straight from the jar drags. Leave a half-inch bare at the far end so it does not squeeze out.
- Rolling in clothSome cooks roll the bare cake in the sugared towel first, let it cool rolled, then unroll, fill and re-roll. That gives a tidier spiral if you are not confident spreading jelly at speed.
- YieldAbout ten slices. Best the day it is made; the sponge dries quickly.
Rolled sponge cakes filled with jam go back well into the nineteenth century in Britain and America, appearing under names like jelly cake, roly-poly and Swiss roll, though the connection to Switzerland is decorative rather than documented. Red currant jelly was a common filling, currants setting firmly without added pectin, and the bushes were widely grown in kitchen gardens until federal and state programs began destroying them in the early twentieth century as hosts of white pine blister rust. The brand names built into the ingredient list — Royal baking powder, Swans Down flour — suggest a manufacturer's formula of the kind that circulated widely in home recipe collections in the 1920s and 1930s.