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Hot-Water Sponge Cake
2 egg yolks. 1/2 C boiling water 1 C sugar 1 T lemon juice 1 t grated lemon rind 2 egg whites 1 C flour Edna F. Doerschuk. 1 t baking powder ½ t salt Beat yolks until thick and lemon colored; add sugar gradually and beat a couple of minutes. Add flour sifted with baking powder and salt. Add boiling water, lemon juice and rind. Beat well with a Dover egg beater. Fold in the whites of eggs. Bake in an unbuttered pan 35 minutes in a slow oven. All measurements are level.
A boiling-water sponge, leavened with both beaten whites and baking powder. The ingredient list as printed is missing an item and has an obvious typesetting slip, both easy to fix.
- The missing yolksThe method begins "beat yolks," but the list gives only whites. Use 2 eggs, separated: the yolks go in first with the sugar, the whites are folded in at the end.
- "12 t salt"A dropped fraction bar. Read it as 1/2 teaspoon salt. Likewise the measurements are level, as the recipe says, so scoop and sweep rather than heaping.
- Slow ovenRoughly 300 to 325F. Thirty-five minutes is a guide only; test with a skewer rather than trusting the clock.
- Boiling water into the batterThe water should be at a boil when it goes in. It thins the yolk foam and is generally credited with the tender, slightly moist crumb of this style of sponge. Adding it gradually while beating is easier to control than all at once.
- Dover egg beaterA hand-cranked rotary beater. A hand mixer on medium does the same job in less time; what matters is a thorough, even beating.
- Unbuttered panThis is deliberate. Foam cakes climb by gripping the sides, so leave the pan ungreased as the recipe says. If you use a tube pan, inverting it to cool is the usual practice to keep the cake from settling.
- Pan and yieldNo pan size is given. A 9-inch tube pan will take this quantity, giving a shallow cake; a 9-inch round layer pan also works, ungreased, with a shorter bake.
- ServingThere is no fat in the batter, so it stales fast. Eat it the day it is baked, plain, with fruit, or with sweetened cream.
Hot-water sponge cakes appear widely in American community cookbooks in the first half of the twentieth century, usually under names like boiling-water sponge or hot-water sponge, and they sit between the true fatless sponge, which depends entirely on long egg beating, and a butter cake. The splash of boiling water and the teaspoon of baking powder are insurance: they let a cook get a light crumb without the arm work of beating eggs at length to a stable foam. The Dover beater named in the method was a widely used rotary egg beater in American kitchens from the later nineteenth century onward.