Hygienic Cake
Three eggs, one cup sugar, one cup flour, two tablespoons hot water. Beat twenty minutes without stopping, and bake three-quarters of an hour in slow oven. This recipe makes a small cake.
Nuts can be added if desired.
A fatless, unleavened sponge: three eggs are the only lift, so nearly everything depends on how much air you beat into them. The ingredient list is simple enough that technique is the whole recipe.
- The hinge is the beatingWith no baking powder, butter or separated whites, the volume comes entirely from whole eggs and sugar whipped to the ribbon stage — pale, tripled, and thick enough that a drizzle from the beater sits on the surface for a second or two. Twenty minutes is a hand-whisk figure; a stand mixer on high needs roughly 8 to 12 minutes.
- Slow ovenPeriod usage puts a slow oven somewhere around 250-325F, so 300F is a reasonable target. A sponge this lean sets slowly and evenly at that heat; higher and the crust forms before the batter has finished rising, which gives a domed, cracked top and a dense band at the base.
- TimingThree-quarters of an hour is plausible for a deep small pan, but check at 30 minutes. The cake is done when the top springs back and a skewer comes out clean; overbaked, a fatless sponge turns dry and papery very quickly.
- The hot waterTwo tablespoons of hot water loosens the thick egg foam so the flour can be folded in without knocking the air out. Add it to the beaten eggs and sugar, not to the flour.
- Folding the flourSift the cup of flour and fold it in by hand in two or three additions, cutting down and turning the bowl. Beating it in with the mixer risks knocking out much of the air you spent twenty minutes working in.
- Pan and yield"A small cake" means roughly a 6- to 7-inch round or a small loaf tin, serving six. Grease and flour the sides lightly, or use a tube pan ungreased so the batter can climb.
- CoolingCool it upside down, still in the pan or on a rack, so the open crumb sets before its own weight compresses it. Turning a warm fatless sponge out flat is how it sinks.
- NutsIf you add them, keep the quantity small — a quarter cup, chopped fine and tossed with a little of the measured flour. Anything heavier sinks through a batter with this little structure.
The name has nothing to do with cleanliness. "Hygienic" cookery is generally traced to the vocabulary of the nineteenth-century health-reform movement, which objected to butter, lard, soda and baking powder as irritants or adulterants; a cake made of nothing but eggs, sugar, flour and water met the test, and recipes of this kind are said to have circulated under names like hygienic, sunshine and hot-water sponge cake. The technique is much older than the label: such cakes avoid chemical leaveners entirely, which is why they survive in books that otherwise reach for baking powder on every page. That a cookbook of this period includes one says something about how long twenty minutes of unbroken whisking was still considered a reasonable request in a domestic kitchen.