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Sponge Cake (Yolks eggs cup sugar)
Yolks 6 eggs 1 cup sugar 1 tablespoon lemon juice Grated rind one-half lemon Whites 6 eggs 1 cup flour ¼ teaspoon salt Beat yolks until thick and lemon-colored, add sugar gradually, and continue beating, using egg-beater. Add lemon juice, rind, and whites of eggs beaten until stiff and dry. When whites are partially mixed with yolks, remove beater, and carefully cut and fold in flour mixed and sifted with salt. Bake one hour in a slow oven, in an angel cake pan or deep narrow pan.
Genuine sponge cake contains no rising properties, but is made light by the quantity of air beaten into both yolks and whites of eggs, and the expansion of that air in baking. It requires a slow oven. All so-called sponge cakes which have the addition of soda and cream of tartar or baking powder require same oven temperature as butter cakes. When failures are made in Sunshine and Angel Cake, they are usually traced to baking in too slow an oven, and removing from oven before thoroughly cooked.
A true foam cake: six eggs, sugar, flour, and nothing else to lift it. Everything depends on how much air you get in and how gently you keep it.
- The typo"14 teaspoon salt" is a printing artifact for 1/4 teaspoon. Sift it with the flour as directed.
- Slow ovenUsually read today as somewhere around 300-325F. The long, gentle bake sets the foam without letting the crust seize before the interior has expanded; the recipe itself warns that too slow an oven is the commoner fault.
- The hingeFold the flour in by hand with a spatula, cutting down and turning over, and stop the moment no dry streaks remain. Beating at this stage deflates the whites and no oven will recover it.
- FlourHousehold flour of the period is generally reckoned to have been softer than modern all-purpose, so cake flour may give a closer match; measure by spooning into the cup and levelling, not scooping.
- The panAn "angel cake pan" is a tube pan, 9 to 10 inches. Leave it ungreased -- the batter needs to grip the sides as it climbs. Do not use a nonstick tube pan for this reason.
- EggsBeat the yolks until they fall in a thick ribbon and are pale, which takes several minutes with an electric mixer. Whites "stiff and dry" means firm peaks; taken past that they turn granular and refuse to fold in.
- DonenessThe author's warning is the useful part: an underbaked sponge collapses. At an hour the top should spring back fully under a finger and a skewer come out clean, and the cake should smell baked rather than eggy.
- CoolingInvert the pan immediately, resting it on its feet or over a bottle neck, and let the cake hang until completely cold before loosening the edges. Cooling right side up compresses the crumb.
- YieldOne 9- or 10-inch tube cake, 10 to 12 slices. Good plain, or with fruit and cream; it stales quickly and is best the day it is made.
Sponge cake belongs to the family of foam cakes that predate chemical leaveners entirely -- cooks raised them with beaten eggs alone, which is why the technique passages in early manuals run longer than the ingredient lists. The insistence here on distinguishing "genuine" sponge cake from the "so-called sponge cakes" leavened with soda and cream of tartar or baking powder marks a real anxiety of the 1890s and 1900s: commercial baking powder had become cheap and ubiquitous. The Boston Cooking School tradition -- which includes Mrs. Lincoln's books as well as Fannie Farmer's -- had as its project to teach cooking as a set of understood principles rather than inherited habits, and this entry is a small example: the recipe ends not with a serving suggestion but with an explanation of why the air expands and why the oven must be slow, followed by a diagnosis of the commonest failure.