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Strawberry Sponge
1⅓ tablespoons granulated 1/3 box gelatine or gelatine 1/3 cup cold water 1/3 cup boiling water 1 cup sugar 1 tablespoon lemon juice 1 cup strawberry juice Whites 3 eggs Whip from 3 cups cream Make same as Orange Charlotte.
Farmer's sponges are gelatine desserts lightened with raw beaten egg white and whipped cream, chilled but never cooked. That is the sticking point here, and it governs everything else on the page.
- The uncooked whitesThe three egg whites are beaten raw and folded into a mixture that is only ever chilled — the gelatine is dissolved in boiling water, but the finished sponge never approaches a temperature that would kill Salmonella. Shell eggs in 1896 were assumed safe raw; that assumption no longer holds, and a dessert eaten cold over several days is a poor place to test it. Use a current recipe if you want a strawberry sponge.
- "1/3 box gelatine"The alternative measure refers to the packaged gelatine then sold by the box, and box sizes appear to have varied between brands. The tablespoon of granulated gelatine is the usable figure; the box fraction is genuinely ambiguous and should not be converted by guesswork.
- "Whip from 3 cups cream"This does not mean three cups of whipped cream. It means the stiff whip skimmed off the top as three cups of cream are beaten. Farmer's cream was also unhomogenised.
- Strawberry juiceA cup of juice pressed from crushed ripe berries, unsweetened and unthickened — not bottled strawberry syrup or nectar, both of which carry their own sugar and would throw off the cup of sugar called for.
- The cross-reference"Make same as Orange Charlotte" sends you to another page of the book. Farmer wrote her cold desserts as a family of variations on one method, so the sponge has no standalone procedure at all; the ingredient list is the whole of what is given here.
The sponge in Fannie Farmer's chapter is broadly a gelatine base whipped to a foam with egg white, as against the Bavarian cream (gelatine and whipped cream); the charlotte is often, though not always, lined with ladyfingers or cake — Farmer's own Orange Charlotte, the model cross-referenced here, is simply moulded. These desserts spread in American households in the later nineteenth century because packaged gelatine made them possible without the long boiling of calves' feet that earlier cookbooks required. Farmer's Boston Cooking-School book, first published in 1896, is famous for insisting on level, standardised measurements, and the tightly cross-referenced cold dessert section shows the same instinct: learn one method, then swap the fruit juice.