Home › Cakes › Sponge Cake (One pound sugar one flour ten)
Sponge Cake (One pound sugar one flour ten)
One pound sugar, one flour, ten eggs.
Stir yolks of eggs and sugar till per fectly light; beat whites of eggs and add them with the flour after beating together lightly; flavor with lemon extract. Three teaspoons baking powder in the flour will add to its lightness, but it never fails without. Bake in a moderate oven.
A true sponge — no butter, no liquid, all lift from the eggs. The proportions are given by weight, which is the most reliable thing about the recipe; measure them on a scale rather than guessing at cups.
- The weights in cupsOne pound of granulated sugar is about 2 1/4 cups. One pound of flour is about 3 1/2 cups all-purpose, or 4 cups cake flour, spooned and levelled — but weigh it if you can, since this batter has nothing to hide a heavy hand.
- Egg sizePeriod eggs may have run somewhat smaller than today's, so ten of them is in the neighbourhood of nine to ten modern large eggs. Ten large eggs will work but give a slightly wetter, more custardy crumb.
- "Perfectly light" means longer than you thinkThe yolk-and-sugar stage is where the cake is made. Beat until the mixture is pale, thick, and falls from the beater in a ribbon that holds a moment on the surface — five to eight minutes with a mixer. Undermixing here is the usual cause of a dense, damp layer at the bottom.
- FoldingBeat the whites to soft, glossy peaks, not stiff and dry, then alternate whites and sifted flour into the yolks in three or four additions. Fold with a large spatula and stop the moment the flour disappears. "Beating together lightly" appears to call for a light hand rather than vigorous stirring.
- The baking powder is optional, and the book says soThree teaspoons in a pound of flour is a modest amount and acts as insurance. Leave it out for the cleaner, chewier texture of a genuine sponge; include it if you are nervous about your whites.
- Oven temperatureA moderate oven is usually taken as about 350–375F. A sponge this size wants steady heat and no opening of the door for the first two-thirds of the bake.
- Pans and yieldThis is a large batch — about 3 lb of batter. Use two 9- or 10-inch tube pans, or two 9-inch round pans plus a small loaf. Grease nothing on the sides if you want maximum climb; line the bottoms only. Figure 40 to 50 minutes for tube pans, 25 to 30 for shallow rounds, and test with a skewer in the centre.
- CoolingInvert the pans and cool the cakes completely before turning them out. A warm sponge released early collapses under its own weight.
- FlavoringLemon was a common sponge flavoring of the period. The zest of one lemon rubbed into the sugar before beating gives more flavor and less alcohol harshness.
Recipes titled by their proportions — "one pound sugar, one flour, ten eggs" — belong to a long tradition of cake formulas built to be memorized rather than read, the same habit that gave us pound cake and 1-2-3-4 cake. Sponge cake in this style is generally traced to the Italian and Spanish biscuit breads of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, which relied entirely on long-beaten eggs for lift; the technique reached English and American kitchens before baking powder became a pantry staple in the second half of the nineteenth century. The offhand note that three teaspoons of baking powder "will add to its lightness, but it never fails without" suggests a moment of transition, when cooks who trusted their arms had begun to accept a safety net.