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Cream Sponge Cake
grated rind and juice 1 lemon 14 cups flour 5 egg whites Cook water and sugar until it threads. Beat egg yolks until lemon-colored and thick. Add sugar syrup, lemon juice and rind, and beat until mixture is cold. Cut and fold in the beaten whites and flour. Bake in an angel cake pan forty to fifty minutes.
The text as printed has lost some of its numbers — the sugar and water quantities are gone entirely and "14 cups flour" is almost certainly a mangled 1¼ cups. Treat it as a method rather than a formula, and read the notes below before scaling anything.
- The missing quantitiesNo amount is given for the sugar or the water, and the yolk count is absent although five whites are called for. A boiled-syrup sponge of this type normally runs to about a cup of sugar and a third of a cup of water for five eggs, but that is inference, not what the book says.
- "Until it threads"The thread stage is around 230-235F on a candy thermometer: the syrup falls from the spoon in a fine thread rather than in drops. Much hotter than that and you risk setting the yolks rather than building a smooth foam.
- Pouring the syrupAdd it to the beaten yolks in a thin stream at the side of the bowl with the beater running, never all at once. Beating until the mixture is genuinely cold, which takes several minutes, helps set the foam that carries this cake, since there is no baking powder in it.
- Oven temperatureNone is stated. A tube-pan sponge of this size wants a slow-to-moderate oven, about 325°F, for the forty to fifty minutes given; hotter and the outside sets before the centre rises.
- The angel cake panA tube pan, ungreased; a loose-bottomed one is easiest to turn out, but period pans were often one piece. The batter must be able to climb the sides, so no grease, no flour, and no non-stick spray.
- Cutting and foldingThe book says only to cut and fold in the whites and the flour; do it lightly with a spatula turned through the centre and up the side. Overworking here is the usual cause of a dense, rubbery sponge.
- CoolingInvert the pan immediately on its feet or over the neck of a bottle and leave it until fully cool. A sponge left upright in a warm pan collapses under its own weight.
- YieldA small tube cake, around 9 inches, giving perhaps eight to ten servings. Best the day it is made; it stales quickly having no fat beyond the yolks.
Boiled-syrup sponges belong to a family of American cakes often associated with the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when whipped-egg leavening was a point of pride and the tall central-tube "angel cake" pan had become a standard piece of kitchen equipment. Cooking the sugar to the thread stage before beating it into the yolks does two things at once: it dissolves the sugar completely and it partly cooks the yolk foam, producing a batter stable enough to survive folding without any chemical leavening. The Lowney company published its cook books to promote its chocolate and cocoa, but the volumes were general household manuals and carried a full complement of plain cakes like this one alongside the chocolate work. The lemon rind and juice are doing the job of flavouring an otherwise very bare mixture.