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Hot-Milk Sponge Cake
2 eggs 1 C sugar 1 C flour 1/2 t salt Mrs. O. C. Jarrett. 1 t baking powder Vanilla 1/2 C hot milk 1 T melted butter Beat eggs, add sugar, beat well, add sifted flour, baking powder salt, and vanilla. Beat in hot milk and melted butter. (Must be hot). Will seem thin. Bake in moderate oven.
Lillian Casey uses 3-8 C hot water.
A community-cookbook shorthand recipe: the ingredient list has been scrambled in transcription and several quantities never made it to print at all. Anyone making this needs to reconcile it against a standard hot-milk sponge before starting.
- Missing quantitiesThe list as printed gives baking powder, vanilla, hot milk, butter and two egg yolks, but no amount of sugar or flour and no count of whole eggs, even though the method says "beat eggs." A conventional hot-milk sponge of this size runs 4 eggs, 1 cup sugar and 1 cup flour; the original does not say so, and that is a reconstruction rather than a conversion.
- Abbreviationst is a teaspoon, T a tablespoon, C a cup. Salt is called for in the method but omitted from the list; a scant 1/4 teaspoon is the usual amount.
- "3-8 C hot water"Almost certainly 3/8 cup, i.e. 6 tablespoons, the printer having lost the fraction bar. Lillian Casey's variation swaps water for the milk, which gives a leaner, springier crumb.
- Moderate ovenGenerally taken as 350F, though the term covers roughly 350 to 375F. The recipe gives no pan or time; a hot-milk sponge of this sort would run about 25 to 30 minutes in an 8-inch square or 9-inch round pan, until the top springs back and a tester comes out clean.
- The milk must actually be hotThe parenthetical "(Must be hot)" is the point the contributor chose to underline. Hot milk keeps the melted butter fluid and dispersed as it goes into the beaten eggs; if it has cooled, the butter is more likely to sink rather than stay worked through the batter. It goes in at the very end, as the recipe directs.
- Thin batter is correct"Will seem thin" is a reassurance, not a warning. Do not compensate with extra flour; the lift comes chiefly from the beaten eggs and sugar, with the teaspoon of baking powder assisting, and the eggs and sugar should be whipped until pale and ribboning before anything else goes in.
- The two yolksListed at the end, apart from the whole eggs, they enrich the crumb and deepen the color. If you are working from a standard four-egg formula, treat them as an addition rather than a substitution.
- YieldAbout 8 to 10 servings. Best the day it is baked; it stales quickly, which is why sponges of this kind were traditionally served with fruit, sauce or whipped cream.
Hot-milk sponge sits at the point where the old egg-raised sponge cake met chemical leavening. Nineteenth-century sponges are generally said to have relied on long hand-beating of eggs; once baking powder came into general household use in American kitchens u a gradual process, with commercial powders appearing from the late 1850s and 1860s u cooks could cut the beating drastically and still get height, and the scalded milk and melted butter added the tenderness that the reduced whipping cost them. The result was a fast, reliable, inexpensive cake that used no chocolate, no nuts and very little butter, which is exactly why it turns up over and over in church and society compilations like this one, each version credited to a named member. The double attribution here, with Lillian Casey's water variation appended to Mrs. Jarrett's recipe, is characteristic of how these books were assembled: contributions arrived as notes among neighbors and were printed close to how they were written, abbreviations, gaps and all.