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Sponge Cake (Two eggs beaten light cup)
Two eggs beaten light, 1 cup sugar beaten in, 1 cup flour, 1 tsp. Royal baking powder (sifted together), 1 tsp. flavoring. Add 1/2 cup hot milk last.
— Mrs. Mae Hammond
This is a hot-milk sponge in its most compact form: two eggs, equal cups of sugar and flour, and a scalded half cup of milk stirred in at the end. The original gives no pan, no temperature and no time, so those are the gaps worth filling.
- The hinge: beat the eggs and sugar properlyWith no butter and only 1 tsp of baking powder, much of the rise depends on air whipped into the eggs. Beat whole eggs and sugar 5 to 8 minutes with a mixer, until pale, thick, and falling from the beater in a ribbon. "Beaten light" implied several minutes of hand work, not thirty seconds.
- The milk must actually be hotScald it to near simmering and add it in a thin stream at the very end, folding rather than beating. Hot milk loosens the batter so it levels in the pan and is associated with the fine, slightly moist crumb of a hot-milk sponge. Cold milk is more likely to deflate the beaten eggs.
- Royal baking powderRoyal was a cream-of-tartar powder, single-acting, so the batter should go into the oven at once. Any modern double-acting baking powder works in the same quantity; do not let the batter stand.
- Flour measureOne cup of all-purpose flour is about 4 1/4 oz / 120 g. Err on the light side; too much flour in a two-egg sponge is unforgiving.
- FlavoringUnspecified, as was common — vanilla extract or lemon extract, 1 tsp.
- SaltThere is none in the original. A pinch of salt in the flour improves it noticeably and changes nothing else.
- Pan, oven and timeEnough batter for one 8-inch round or a small loaf. Bake at 350F for 25 to 30 minutes in the round, a little longer in a loaf, until the top springs back and a skewer comes out clean. The original gives no oven instruction at all.
- Yield and servingEight modest slices. It is a plain cake by design — meant for stewed fruit, whipped cream, or a thin lemon glaze, and it stales within a day.
Hot-milk sponge belongs to the era when chemical baking powder had, by many accounts, made cake something closer to everyday baking than a project. Recipes like this one — no butter, no separated eggs, a single cup of each dry ingredient so the proportions could be carried in the head — spread through community and church cookbooks in the last decades of the nineteenth century and the first of the twentieth. The naming of Royal by brand is a period signature: Royal Baking Powder advertised heavily and distributed its own recipe pamphlets, and contributors to books like this one seem often to have written the brand into the ingredient list. The attribution to Mrs. Mae Hammond is equally characteristic. Philathea classes, in the Baraca-Philathea movement, were young women's Bible classes.