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Sponge-Cakes, Small
sugar; flavouring to taste. AVERAGE. INGREDIENTS for 18 cakes. - The weight of 8 eggs in flour, the weight of 8 eggs in pounded loaf sugar; flavouring to taste. te. AVERAGE COST, 1s.
Let the flour be perfectly dry, and the sugar well pounded and sifted. Separate the whites from the yolks of the eggs, and beat the latter up with the sugar; then whisk the whites until they become rather stiff, and mix them with the yolks, but do not stir them more than is just necessary to mingle the ingredients well together.
Dredge in the flour by degrees, add the flavouring; butter the tins well, pour in the batter, sift a little sugar over the cakes, and bake them in rather a quick oven, but do not allow them to take too much colour, as they should be rather pale. Remove them from the tins before they get cold, and turn them on their faces, where let them remain until quite cold, when store them away in a closed tin canister or wide-mouthed glass bottle.
TIME.-10 to 15 minutes in a quick oven.
SEASONABLE at any time.
THE SPRAT. poured over them; they may then be skinned and served, and this will be found a much better way than boiling them.
A classic fatless sponge batter measured by weighing eggs rather than by cup or spoon. The method is sound; only the units, the sugar and the oven need translating.
- Weighing by eggThe weight is taken from the eggs themselves; Beeton does not say whether in the shell or shelled, though weighing them whole in the shell is the usual reading. Eight large eggs in the shell come to roughly 1 lb / 450 g, so expect somewhere near that much flour and the same of sugar — the point of the method being that the batter balances to whatever size eggs you have.
- Pounded loaf sugarLoaf sugar was sold in hard cones and broken up at home; pounded and sifted, it is what we now buy as caster sugar. Use caster, not granulated, so it dissolves into the yolks.
- Oven"Rather a quick oven" is usually rendered as somewhere in the region of 375–425°F / 190–220°C, but the book states no temperatures. The instruction not to let them take colour is the real constraint: pull them while still pale, within the 10 to 15 minutes the recipe allows.
- The hinge: fold, do not stirBeat the yolks and sugar until pale and ribbon-thick, whisk the whites to soft-stiff peaks, then combine with as few strokes as will just mingle them, and dredge the flour in a little at a time. There is no butter or raising agent in this batter — the whipped egg is the only lift, and overworking it gives flat, tough cakes.
- TinsEighteen cakes from this quantity means smallish individual tins; Beeton does not specify the shape, and the portions are large enough to suit shallow bun or similar moulds. Butter them heavily and dust with sugar as directed, which helps give a crisp outer crust.
- Turning them on their facesThe recipe is explicit that they come out of the tins before they are cold and stay face-down until quite cold; the purpose was presumably to keep the delicate crumb from sinking as it set. Follow it as written rather than leaving them to cool in the tins.
- FlavouringThe original leaves this open; grated lemon zest, a little orange-flower water or vanilla are all period-appropriate. Add it with the last of the flour.
- StorageThe tin canister or wide-mouthed bottle is not fussiness — fatless sponge stales within a day in open air. Store fully cold and airtight, and eat within two or three days.
- Stray textThe lines about sprats at the end belong to a neighbouring entry in the book and have nothing to do with the cakes.
Sponge cake belongs to the family of egg-raised batters that European cooks developed before chemical raising agents, and English recipes for it appear well before Mrs Beeton — the ratio of eggs to their own weight in sugar and flour was a standing formula in eighteenth-century receipt books. Baking these small, in buttered and sugared tins, produced the sponge fingers and "sponge biscuits" that Victorian households kept on hand to serve with wine, custards, jellies and trifle, or to give to invalids and children. The instruction to pound and sift the sugar is a reminder that granulated sugar in a bag was not yet standard: sugar arrived as a hard refined loaf, and reducing it was a routine kitchen chore. The recipe gives an average cost of one shilling for eighteen cakes.