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Plain Sponge Cake
1/2 weight of eggs in flour weight of eggs in sugar 3 tablespoons lemon juice Beat yolks ten minutes; add sugar; beat five minutes; add lemon juice and flour; when well blended, add stiffly beaten whites, cutting and folding them in.
Pour into angel cake pan and bake in a moderate oven one hour.
Plain Sponge Cake No. 2 1 cup powdered sugar ½ cup flour + teaspoon salt grated rind lemon 1 tablespoon lemon juice 4 eggs Beat yolks until lemon-colored and thick; add sugar, rind and juice of lemon. Cut and fold in the well-beaten whites, also the sifted flour. When thoroughly blended, pour into buttered and papered pan and bake thirty to forty minutes. 3 egg yolks 1 cup sugar 1 cup flour
Two egg-foam cakes with no chemical leavening at all — the lift comes entirely from beaten eggs, so the folding and the oven do all the work. The transcription is imperfect in places, and a few figures need reading with care.
- The hinge: fold, do not stirOnce the whites go in, every stroke costs you volume. Cut down through the batter with the side of a spatula, sweep along the bottom and turn the mass over, rotating the bowl. Sifted flour is folded in the same way, in two or three additions, and the batter goes into the oven immediately.
- "Weight of eggs in flour and sugar"The old formula is generally read as weighing the whole eggs, shells on, then matching that weight in sugar and again in flour. Six large eggs run about 12 oz, which would give roughly 12 oz (about 1¾ cups) sugar and 12 oz (about 2¾ cups) flour. The recipe as printed never says how many eggs to use.
- Oven temperatureA moderate oven is usually taken as 350-375F. For a full hour in a tube pan, 325F is safer for a cake with no leavening and a lot of sugar. The second recipe names no oven heat at all; around 350F suits its thirty to forty minutes.
- "Powdered sugar"In American books of this period powdered sugar means finely granulated sugar, not the cornstarch-cut confectioners' sugar sold under that name today. Use superfine or ordinary granulated.
- Beating timesTen minutes on the yolks and five more after the sugar assume a hand whisk or a rotary beater. A stand mixer on medium-high reaches the same pale, thick, ribbon stage in three to four minutes for the yolks and two or three after the sugar.
- Buttered and papered panPapered means lining with parchment cut to the pan. Note that the first cake goes into an angel cake pan — a tube pan — which for a sponge is traditionally left ungreased so the batter can climb the sides, and is cooled upside down.
- Garbled figuresThe salt in No. 2 is printed as "+ teaspoon" and is almost certainly ¼ teaspoon. The stray line at the end — 3 egg yolks, 1 cup sugar, 1 cup flour — is the ingredient list of a further recipe whose method is not on this page; ignore it.
- Yield and keepingThe tube cake will serve ten to twelve; No. 2, with four eggs, perhaps six to eight. Both are dry cakes by design, meant for fruit, custard sauce or whipped cream, and they stale fast — eat within a day or two.
Lowney's Cook Book was issued by the Walter M. Lowney Company, the Boston chocolate manufacturer, and like other maker-sponsored cookbooks of the era it padded its chocolate recipes with a full general repertoire so a household would keep it on the shelf. Sponge cake belongs to the older, pre-baking-powder family of cakes raised entirely on beaten egg, a technique often traced to European bakers of the sixteenth century, though the clear recipes are later, and which reached its American peak in the nineteenth. The weight-of-eggs formula in the first version is a survival from the days before standardized measuring cups: eggs varied, so you matched the sugar and flour to whatever eggs you had, a habit that persisted in print long after Fannie Farmer's level-measurement gospel had taken hold in the same city.