Jelly Roll
2 cups pastry flour 2 teaspoons baking powder 3 egg whites 1 teaspoon vanilla Sift baking powder and salt with flour, and follow directions for making Sponge Cake. Pour into mediumsized buttered dripping pan to depth of one half inch. Bake in a moderate oven ten to twelve minutes; turn on to a wet cheese cloth sprinkled with confectioners' sugar. Cut off edges of cake, spread with warm jelly, and roll. Work quickly. 1 pound butter 1 pound sugar 10 eggs Cream butter;
The text as printed is incomplete: the ingredient list gives flour, baking powder, egg whites and vanilla, then defers to the book's Sponge Cake method for the rest, and the final line about butter, sugar and ten eggs is the opening of the next recipe on the page. Treat this as a set of directions rather than a full formula.
- The missing ingredientsA sponge sheet of this size needs sugar and yolks along with the whites. Those amounts are not printed here and cannot be recovered from this page, so use a current sponge roll formula for the batter and follow these directions for the rolling. Note also that the method calls for salt, which the ingredient list omits.
- Stray text"1 pound butter, 1 pound sugar, 10 eggs, Cream butter" is the opening of the next recipe on the page — the proportions point to a pound cake — and has nothing to do with the jelly roll.
- Pastry flourLower in protein than all-purpose. Cake flour is the closest easy substitute; the usual trick of replacing two tablespoons of each cup of all-purpose flour with cornstarch approximates cake flour, which is softer still than pastry flour.
- Dripping panA shallow rimmed pan. A modern jelly-roll pan, about 10 by 15 inches, is the nearest common equivalent to a "medium-sized" dripping pan. Half an inch of batter is the point; a thicker sheet cracks when rolled.
- Moderate ovenThe book gives no temperature; "moderate" is conventionally read as somewhere around 350-375F. Ten to twelve minutes is plausible for a half-inch sponge and should not be extended — an overbaked sheet is dry at the surface and will split rather than bend.
- The hinge: roll it hot"Work quickly" is the whole technique. Turn the cake out the moment it leaves the oven, trim the crisp edges, spread the jelly while both cake and jelly are warm, and roll immediately. A cooled sheet has set and will crack along the outside curve.
- The clothDamp cheesecloth dusted with confectioners' sugar keeps the sponge from sticking and from drying. A clean damp kitchen towel works the same way; roll the cake up in the cloth if you want to hold its shape while it cools.
- The jellyWarm the jelly and stir it smooth so it spreads in a thin film. Jam with fruit pieces or a slack jelly will soak the sponge and squeeze out at the ends.
- YieldOne roll, which slices into roughly ten to twelve pieces; the original gives no yield.
The jelly roll belongs to a family of rolled sponges that spread through nineteenth-century English and American baking — variously called Swiss roll, roulade, or in older American books "jelly cake" when the layers were stacked rather than rolled. Its appeal to a period cookbook is practical: a sponge batter needs no chemical leavening beyond a little baking powder, bakes in ten minutes, and turns a small amount of preserve into a filled cake without frosting or a second baking. Lowney's book was published by the Walter M. Lowney Company, a Boston chocolate manufacturer, and it surrounds its chocolate recipes with a full complement of standard household baking so the book could serve as a general kitchen manual. The instruction to turn the hot sheet onto sugared cheesecloth is the same trick still taught today, and it survives because nothing has improved on it.