Sponge Cake
5 eggs. 1 cup sugar. 1 cup water. 1 1/2 cups flour. 1 heaping teaspoon baking powder sifted with flour 5 times. Flavor to taste.
Cook sugar with water until it is a thick sirup. Let cool and pour over well beaten yolks of eggs. Fold in flour, then the beaten whites, and flavor. Bake quickly in layers or in a sheet.--Mrs. Hayden Dodd.
This is a boiled-syrup sponge — no butter, no milk, and its lift comes almost entirely from air beaten into the eggs. The hinge is the syrup: cook it too little and the batter is slack, pour it in hot and you scramble the yolks.
- The syrup stage"Thick sirup" here points to something around the thread stage, in the region of 215-235F, by which point the syrup has visibly reduced and thickened. Cook it further and you move toward soft-ball, which tends to give a denser, chewier crumb.
- Let cool, but not coldLukewarm is the target. Boiling syrup will curdle the yolks; a syrup left until fully cold sets up and will not ribbon into them. Pour in a thin stream while beating, and keep beating until the mixture is pale, thick and holds a slow ribbon.
- Sifting five timesNot superstition. Household flour of the period was more variable, and baking powder was not always evenly distributed once it had sat in the tin. Two passes through a sifter with a modern all-purpose flour will generally do the same work.
- Baking powder in a spongeA heaping teaspoon is insurance against under-beaten eggs. If your yolk foam and whites are both properly whipped, a level teaspoon is plenty and the crumb will be finer.
- "Bake quickly"Read that as a hot oven: roughly 400-425F, with a thin sheet done in under ten minutes and layers in fifteen to twenty. The cake should spring back when pressed and be just pulling from the sides. Sponge dries out fast, so pull it at the first sign of doneness.
- PansLine the bottom with parchment and leave the sides bare — a fatless sponge needs to grip the pan as it climbs. Cool layers in the pan a few minutes before turning out, and roll a sheet while it is still warm if you intend a jelly roll.
- What is missingThere is no salt and no fat at all. A pinch of salt with the flour and a teaspoon of lemon juice in the whites both sharpen a cake that otherwise tastes mainly of sugar and egg. "Flavor to taste" was commonly answered with vanilla, lemon extract or grated lemon rind, though the recipe leaves it open.
- YieldAbout two thin 8-inch layers or one half-sheet, serving eight to ten. The recipe leaves the choice of layers or sheet to the cook.
- A note on placementThe page is filed under Vegetables, which appears to be a filing or typesetting error rather than an instruction.
Sponge cakes divide into two families: the plain kind, where sugar is beaten dry into the eggs, and the hot-syrup kind, where a cooked sugar syrup is whipped into the yolks first. The second method is the pastry cook's pâte à bombe in domestic dress, and it was popular in American community and newspaper recipes of the early twentieth century because the hot syrup does much of the work of stabilising the foam — useful before electric mixers, when a cake stood or fell on how long an arm could hold out with a wire whisk.