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Sponge Cake with Cream Filling
("New England Cream Pie.) 3 eggs. 1 1/2 cups sugar. 2 cups flour. 1/2 cup cold water. 1 teaspoonful cream of tartar. 1/2 teaspoon soda. Bake in a quick oven in two layers.
A bare-bones formula of the kind Mrs. Wilson printed by the hundred, assuming the reader already knew how a sponge batter is put together. The proportions are sound; almost everything else has to be supplied.
- The hinge: how the eggs are handledThere is no butter or oil here, so the eggs are the structure. Beat whole eggs with the sugar until pale, thick and ribboning, then fold in the sifted dry ingredients alternately with the water. Stir it like a butter cake and it will bake dense and tough.
- "A quick oven"Period usage puts that somewhere around 375-425F, hotter than most modern bakers would take a sponge. For two thin layers 375-400F for about 20 minutes gives a better crumb; the layers are done when the centre springs back.
- Cream of tartar and sodaTogether they are a homemade single-acting baking powder. The pair reacts as soon as the water goes in, so get the batter into the pans and into the oven without delay.
- What is missingNo salt and no flavouring are given. A quarter teaspoon of salt and a teaspoon of vanilla are consistent with the period and improve it considerably.
- PansTwo 8- or 9-inch round layers. Cakes of this sort were sometimes baked in pie tins, which is one traditional explanation for the "pie" in the title.
- The cream fillingThe title promises one but the text does not supply it. A standard pastry cream, about 2 cups milk, 1/2 cup sugar, 3 tablespoons cornstarch, 2 egg yolks and vanilla, cooked until thick and cooled, is what the name refers to. Chill the assembled cake and eat it within a day.
- YieldOne two-layer cake, eight to ten servings. A dusting of powdered sugar is finish enough.
Cake baked in pie plates and split with a custard between the halves was a New England commonplace long before anyone standardised its name; nineteenth-century books print it variously as cream pie, custard cake, or Boston cream pie, and the claim that the Parker House in Boston fixed the modern version in the 1850s is traditional rather than firmly documented. What is certain is that the cake itself belongs to the water-sponge family, which used no butter at all and relied on beaten eggs plus a cream of tartar and soda pairing for lift, an economical formula that mattered in a book written by Mary A. Wilson, who came to prominence advising American households on wartime and post-war thrift for the Ladies' Home Journal. The terseness of the entry is characteristic: her readers were expected to know how to beat eggs to the ribbon and to have a cream filling already in their repertoire.