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True Sponge Cake
6 eggs 1 cup sugar 1 cup flour juice and rind one lemon 1/4 teaspoon salt Follow directions for making Sponge Cake. Bake in a deep pan forty to sixty minutes. 1 cup granulated sugar 1 cup egg whites 1 cup flour
A leavener-free sponge that rises on beaten egg alone, so the handling of the eggs is the whole recipe. Note also that the text as printed runs two formulas together.
- The stray second listThe trailing "1 cup granulated sugar, 1 cup egg whites, 1 cup flour" does not belong to the six-egg list and looks like the opening of an adjacent recipe, probably a white or angel-type cake. Work from the six-egg list.
- The garbled salt"+teaspoon salt" is a printer's or scanner's mangling of a fraction; a half teaspoon suits this quantity of batter, but the original figure is genuinely lost.
- No leavening, by designThere is no baking powder or soda. All the lift comes from yolks beaten until thick and pale and whites beaten to a firm but not dry peak, with the flour folded in by hand at the end. Overmix at that stage and the cake bakes flat and tough.
- The referenced directionsThe directions being cross-referenced are not on this page, so the exact wording cannot be quoted; the usual period sponge sequence is yolks beaten with the sugar and lemon, sifted flour and salt folded in, whites folded last. Sift the flour more than once; flour of this period was softer and less uniform than modern all-purpose.
- Oven heatThe recipe specifies no oven temperature. A sponge of this depth is normally baked in a slow to moderate oven, in the region of 325F; if the heat is too high the crust sets before the centre has risen. The forty-to-sixty-minute range is simply a spread, not evidence of a particular temperature.
- "A deep pan"The original says no more than that. A tube pan or a deep round, with the sides left unbuttered so the batter can climb, suits this batter; grease the sides and the cake slips down as it cools. The sizes are a modern guess, not in the text.
- CoolingInvert the pan and let the cake hang until completely cold before turning it out. A warm sponge collapses under its own weight.
- YieldNo yield is stated; a cake of this size would cut into roughly ten to twelve slices. Best on the day it is made; it stales quickly, having no added fat beyond the egg yolks.
A "true" sponge cake in period usage meant one raised only by eggs, distinguishing it from the chemically leavened cakes that had taken over American baking after the spread of cream of tartar and soda in the mid-nineteenth century and commercial baking powder after it. It is tempting to read the adjective as a quiet claim of authenticity, though that is inference rather than documented practice. Lowney's cook book was published by the Walter M. Lowney Company, a Boston chocolate manufacturer, and like other maker-sponsored volumes of the 1900s it padded its chocolate recipes with a full general cookery course, which is why a plain lemon sponge with no chocolate in it appears here at all. The lemon rind and juice do double work: flavour, and a little acid to help the beaten whites hold.