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Flour (Teaspoons baking powder)
1¼ teaspoons baking powder ¼ teaspoon salt Whites 4 eggs 1 teaspoon lemon extract Beat yolks of eggs and water until thick and lemoncolored, add sugar gradually, and beat two minutes. Put corn-starch in a cup and fill cup with flour. Mix and sift corn-starch and flour with baking powder and salt, and add to first mixture. When thoroughly mixed add whites of eggs beaten until stiff, and flavoring. Bake thirty minutes in a moderate oven. This is an excellent mixture to use for whipped cream pies or to bake in an angel cake pan.
This is a hot-water sponge cake, and the page as printed has lost the head of its ingredient list — the sugar, water, cornstarch and flour quantities are gone. What survives is enough to identify the method but not enough to bake from without a full copy of the recipe.
- The missing amountsThe text begins mid-list at the baking powder. The quantities of sugar, water, cornstarch and flour for this version are not on the page. Do not guess them; find the complete entry.
- "14 teaspoon salt"An optical-character error for 1/4 teaspoon. Similarly, 11/4 is 1 1/4 teaspoons baking powder.
- Cornstarch measured by displacement"Put corn-starch in a cup and fill cup with flour" means the two together make one cup, not a cup of each. The cornstarch lowers the protein of the flour and gives the crumb its fine, tender grain — the same trick as making cake flour at home.
- A moderate ovenThe book gives no temperature; "moderate" is conventionally read as somewhere around 350F. Thirty minutes suits a shallow layer or a tube pan of this size; a deeper pan will need longer, and the cake is done when it springs back and pulls slightly from the side.
- Beating the yolks"Thick and lemon-colored" is the foundation: this cake has no butter, so the aeration in the yolks and whites carries much of the structure, alongside the baking powder called for. Two minutes more after the sugar goes in, as directed.
- Folding, not mixingThe whites go in last and should be folded through with a spatula. "Thoroughly mixed" applies to the flour stage, not to the whites.
- Lemon extractStill sold, though it is now usually alcohol and lemon oil rather than the older tinctures. A teaspoon is assertive in a cake this plain; grated zest is a common substitution.
- Ungreased tube panIf baking in the angel cake pan the author suggests, leave the pan dry and invert it to cool. A sponge with this little fat depends on clinging to the sides as it sets.
Fannie Farmer's Boston Cooking-School Cook Book included a series of sponge cakes -- sunshine cake, angel cake and others -- that share a single logic: eggs beaten separately, sugar, a small quantity of soft flour cut with cornstarch, and little or no butter. They belong to the era of reliable baking powder, cheap refined cornstarch, and the Boston Cooking School's level-measurement gospel. The closing note that it is "an excellent mixture to use for whipped cream pies" suggests such a batter could be baked in shallow layers, split, and filled, rather than treated as a finished cake in itself. The garbled numbers here look like an artifact of the scanning of an old printing rather than of the original text.