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Calumet Jelly Roll
3 eggs beaten separately 1 cup sugar 1½ cups pastry flour 2 level teaspoons Calumet Baking Powder 1/2 cup warm water-flavor Sift flour once, then measure; add baking powder and sift three times; beat whites stiff; fold in sugar, fold in beaten yolks, then flour lightly. Bake in long tin in hot oven.
When done spread quickly with jelly, and roll carefully in napkin.
A sponge roll from a baking powder company's promotional booklet, written for cooks who already knew the method. The instructions omit a step, and the pan and oven need translating.
- The missing waterThe ingredient list calls for half a cup of warm water but the method never adds it. Fold it in with the yolks, before the flour, or the batter will be too stiff to spread. Half a cup is a generous amount of liquid for three eggs and 1 1/2 cups flour; a scant half cup gives a batter that pours but still holds air.
- "Flavor"The trailing word appears to mean add flavoring to taste; vanilla, or lemon extract if the jelly is a tart one. It would go in with the yolks.
- Hot ovenRead this as roughly 400-425F. A sponge sheet this thin bakes in about 10-13 minutes; it is done when the top springs back and the edges just begin to pull from the pan. Overbaking is a common cause of a roll that cracks.
- Long tinA jelly roll pan, roughly 10 by 15 inches with a shallow rim. Line it with parchment; the original presumably relied on a greased and floured tin, which works but risks tearing.
- Pastry flourLower in protein than all-purpose. Substitute cake flour straight across, or use all-purpose with two tablespoons per cup replaced by cornstarch.
- Sift once, then measureThis is not fussiness. Nineteenth- and early twentieth-century flour packed hard in the barrel, and the sifted-then-measured cup is noticeably lighter than a scooped one. By weight, 1 1/2 cups sifted cake flour is about 150 g.
- RollingTurn the hot cake onto a sugared towel, peel the paper, and roll it up in the towel while still warm even if you are spreading jelly first. The cake must be rolled hot; a cooled sponge cracks along the outer curve. Warm the jelly slightly so it spreads without dragging.
- YieldOne roll, about ten slices.
Calumet Baking Powder was a Chicago brand founded in the 1880s, and Reliable Recipes was the little booklet it distributed to put its own tin into every household kitchen. Recipes like this one carry the brand name in the title and specify the product by name in the ingredient list, a standard tactic of the period when double-acting baking powders were still competing hard against homemade soda-and-cream-of-tartar mixtures. The jelly roll itself is older than the marketing: thin sponge sheets spread with preserves and rolled were common in British and American baking through the nineteenth century, and the form is close kin to the Swiss roll, a name generally traced to English usage of the 1870s with no particular Swiss connection. What is notable here is the leavening at all. A properly beaten sponge needs none, and the two level teaspoons of baking powder are insurance for the home cook, and advertising for Calumet.