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Sponge Cake (Egg yolks C sugar C boiling)
6 egg yolks 1 C sugar 1/2 C boiling water 1 t lemon extract 1½ C Swansdown flour ½ t salt 2 t baking powder Beat eggs until very light, thick and lemon colored. Add sugar and beat well. Add boiling water, then add sifted ingredients. Beat very thoroughly. Add flavoring. Bake in two layer tins in hot oven. The batter is quite thin. Sift flour and sugar as for Angel Food cake. Make a custard filling for this cake. 1 lb. butter
A yolk-only hot-water sponge, the sort of cake church books printed to use up the yolks left from an angel food. The typography of the original has suffered in places, so read the quantities with care.
- The salt is a typo"12 t salt" is a mangled 1/2 teaspoon. Twelve teaspoons would be inedible, and half a teaspoon is standard for this quantity of flour.
- The stray pound of butterThe "1 lb. butter" at the end belongs to no step in this cake and is almost certainly the first line of the next recipe, run together in typesetting. There is no fat in a sponge cake of this type.
- Swansdown flourSwans Down was and is a bleached soft-wheat cake flour. Any cake flour substitutes directly, measured 1 1/2 cups sifted before measuring.
- Hot ovenPeriod sources put a "hot oven" somewhere in the 400-450F range, with no single agreed figure. For thin sponge layers the lower end is safer; around 400F for roughly 18-22 minutes, until the top springs back and the edges pull from the tin.
- The boiling water is the hingeAdding boiling water to the beaten yolk-and-sugar foam is what makes this cake tender without butter. Pour it in a slow stream while beating so the yolks do not scramble, and get the flour in and the batter into the tins promptly, before the aeration collapses.
- "Beat until very light, thick and lemon colored"With a stand mixer this is five to eight minutes on high; the yolks should fall from the beater in a wide ribbon that sits on the surface. This is the only leavening besides the baking powder.
- Ungreased or greased tinsSponge batters climb the sides of a tin. Grease the bottoms only, or line with parchment and leave the sides bare, so the layers rise straight.
- The fillingThe book assumes you know a boiled custard filling: about 1 cup milk, 2 tablespoons cornstarch, 1/3 cup sugar, 2 yolks, cooked to a thick pudding and cooled fully before spreading. Yield is one two-layer cake, eight to ten slices.
Hot-water sponge cakes belong to the long stretch between the all-egg-foam sponges of the eighteenth century and the shortened butter cakes that chemical leavening made easy. The boiling water dissolves the sugar and thins the yolk foam so a nearly fatless batter still bakes moist, and the trick was common enough in American community cookbooks by the early twentieth century that recipes like this one rarely bothered to explain it. The instruction to "sift flour and sugar as for Angel Food cake" is the giveaway to why the recipe exists at all: angel food takes only whites, and a thrifty kitchen needed somewhere for six yolks to go. Named brands in the ingredient list, Swans Down here, are typical of the period, when branded cake flour was a recent convenience worth specifying by name.