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Eight-Egg Sponge Cake
1 pound of fine granulated sugar-2 rounded cups. 8 eggs. 6 tablespoonfuls of water--small 1/2 cup. 12 ounces of flour--3 rounded cups. Separate the eggs, the white into a bowl, the yolks into the mixing pan. Put the water and sugar in with the yolks and beat them ten minutes, until they are a thick light batter. Have the flour ready. Whip the whites to a very firm froth, then mix the flour with the yolk mixture and stir the whites in last. Bake in molds either large or small Good for large and small sponge cakes and lady fingers.
A classic hot-water-free sponge that rises on egg alone. Two things decide whether it works: how long the yolks and sugar are beaten, and how gently the flour and whites go in.
- Weigh, don't scoopGo by the ounces, not the cups: 1 lb sugar (about 2 1/4 cups by modern measure) and 12 oz flour (about 2 3/4 cups of today's all-purpose, which is finer and denser than 1900 pastry flour). The book's own cup equivalents do not match modern flat cups in either direction, so the weights are the safer guide.
- No leavening is not an omissionThere is no baking powder or soda here, and none should be added. All the lift comes from air beaten into the yolks and whites, which is why the ten-minute yolk beating is the hinge of the recipe.
- The yolk stageTen minutes by hand translates to roughly 5 to 7 minutes in a stand mixer on high with the whisk. The yolk-sugar-water mixture should fall from the whisk in a thick ribbon and hold a trace on the surface for a second or two. Under-beaten yolks give a dense, damp layer at the bottom.
- "Stir" means foldSift the flour over the yolk foam and fold with a spatula, then fold in the whites in two or three additions. Actual stirring will knock out the air the cake depends on. Whip the whites only to firm, glossy peaks, not dry and crumbly, or they will not blend.
- Room-temperature eggsEight large eggs are a reasonable modern stand-in, though period eggs varied in size. Let them come to room temperature before separating; cold whites whip slowly and cold yolks take longer to reach the ribbon stage.
- Oven and pansThe book assumes you know the temperature, so: 350F for large cakes in an ungreased tube pan or paper-lined loaf pans, 375F for small molds, and 375 to 400F for lady fingers, which need only 8 to 10 minutes. A large cake runs 35 to 45 minutes and is done when it springs back and a skewer comes out clean.
- CoolingInvert a large sponge and let it cool upside down in the pan. Turned out warm, the open crumb collapses under its own weight.
- YieldThe full batch is generous by modern standards: one large tube cake, or several dozen lady fingers. It halves cleanly if you weigh the ingredients.
Sponge cakes are counted by their eggs in nineteenth-century American baking manuals, and a title like "Eight-Egg" is a shorthand a working baker would read instantly as a ratio: a pound of sugar, three-quarters of a pound of flour, and eggs enough to raise both. The instructions give beating times but no oven temperature, no pan size and no baking time, all of which the reader was expected to judge from experience. The batter serves across large cakes, small molded cakes and lady fingers: chemical leaveners were widely available by this period, but for piped and molded work the egg-foam sponge held its shape and its fine, dry crumb better, and it remains the base of Italian and French savoiardi and biscuits emov