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Wine or Brandy Sauce
14 ounces of granulated sugar. 12 eggs. 14 ounces of finest flour. Vanilla flavor, about two teaspoonfuls.
Beat the sugar and eggs together in a kettle half an hour by the clock. You can't time it by the arm ache, as ten minutes seems half an hour that way. Have the ingredients all cold and beat in a cool place. When the time is up the kettle will be half full of a foamy batter. Then stir in the flour in portions. Do not beat but stir round till the flour is pretty well mingled and out of sight. Add the vanilla extract. To be perfect all sponge cake articles must be cooked as soon as the batter is finished. Steam it in pudding moulds, jelly moulds, melon moulds or any kind you like--no matter about lids--about an hour and a half.
Whenever any of these cake mixture puddings seem to be heavy or sticky, provided the fault is not in the steaming, they may be corrected next time by using a<??>trifle less sugar. At great altitudes the sugar has to be considerably less, and newly arrived pastry cooks are often "thrown" through not understanding or being willing to believe it.
The heading is a leftover from the surrounding pages: what follows is a steamed sponge pudding batter, not a sauce. It is a fatless sponge leavened entirely by beaten egg, so the beating is the whole recipe.
- Weights, not cups14 oz granulated sugar is about 2 cups; 14 oz of "finest flour" is roughly 3 1/4 to 3 1/2 cups of modern cake flour, but flour varies enough by scoop that the ounces are the figure to trust. Eggs of the period may run somewhat smaller than today's large eggs; about 20 oz (570 g) of whole egg is a reasonable reading of twelve.
- "Kettle" means a deep potIn a nineteenth-century hotel kitchen the kettle is simply the largest deep vessel to hand, used here as a mixing bowl because the foam expands greatly; the recipe expects it to fill the kettle halfway. Use a bowl of at least 5 quarts.
- Half an hour by hand, far less by machineA stand mixer with the whisk on medium-high reaches the same ribbon stage in 8 to 12 minutes: the mass should be pale, nearly white, and fall from the whisk in a thick ribbon that holds a trace on the surface for several seconds.
- Cold ingredients, cool roomThe instruction is deliberate and worth keeping, though the original does not say why.
- Fold, do not stirStir, do not beat -- This is the hinge. The original adds the flour in portions and stirs only until it is out of sight; any real beating knocks out the air and there is nothing else to lift the pudding. Get it into the moulds and into the steam immediately, as the original insists.
- Setting up the steamerButter and sugar the moulds, fill them no more than two-thirds, and set them on a rack in a covered pot with simmering water reaching halfway up. Keep the water at a bare simmer and top it up with boiling water; a hard boil will make the outside tough before the centre sets.
- DonenessAn hour and a half suits a quart mould. Smaller moulds are done in 45 minutes to an hour — the pudding should spring back when pressed and read about 200F at the centre. Rest 10 minutes before turning out.
- The altitude noteSound advice, still given. Above about 3,000 feet reduce the sugar by 1 to 2 tablespoons per cup and expect to cut a little more as you go higher; excess sugar weakens the egg foam's structure where the air pressure is already working against it.
- Yield and servingThe foamed batter is bulky; divided among moulds filled no more than two-thirds it will serve 10 to 12. The section title tells you what to pour over it: a warm wine or brandy sauce.
Jessup Whitehead wrote for men working the ranges of American hotels and restaurants in the 1880s and 1890s, and The American Pastry Cook reads like a working manual rather than a housekeeping book — hence the aside about "newly arrived pastry cooks" who would not believe what great altitudes did to their sugar. The recipe itself belongs to a family of steamed sponge puddings that let a kitchen turn one sponge batter into a dozen desserts: baked flat it is a sheet cake, steamed in a melon or jelly mould it becomes a hot pudding to be sauced at service. Fatless sponge of this kind, raised by nothing but long-beaten egg, is generally traced to the Italian and French biscuit traditions and reached American commercial kitchens well before chemical leaveners were trusted for fine work. The wine or brandy sauce named in the heading was the standard hot accompaniment for steamed puddings on nineteenth-century menus, which is why the two sit together on the page.