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Little Sponge-Cake Puddings
917. Mix three eggs, leaving out one white, three ounces of powdered lump sugar, three ounces or spoonsful of flour, three ounces of butter beaten. Add the eggs and then the flour, then the sugar, beating each before adding the other. Bake about a quarter of an hour in little cups, putting in the oven as soon as beaten; lay a little orange marmalade on them when baked. Another. Beat the whites of two and the yolks of four eggs, and into that beat six ounces of sugar sifted, and four ounces of flour dried for a few minutes, till well mixed. Put a spoonful into a cup buttered (rather more for a pudding), and bake in a quick oven. This quantity will make ten or twelve cakes, wine sauce with the puddings.
Two versions of the same small cake: one enriched with butter, one a plain whisked sponge. Both depend entirely on beaten egg for lift, so the batter goes into the oven the moment it is mixed.
- Powdered lump sugarLoaf sugar crushed and sieved at home, roughly the fineness of modern caster sugar. Caster sugar is the direct substitute; granulated will not dissolve fully in a short beating.
- The flour measure"Three ounces or spoonsful" reads as though the two were interchangeable, and is genuinely ambiguous; three ounces (about 85 g) is the larger reading, while three tablespoons would be well under it.
- Butter beatenSoftened butter creamed until pale, not melted. The instruction order is unusual: cream the butter first, then work in eggs, flour and sugar in that sequence, beating between each.
- Little cupsButtered ramekins, dariole moulds or a deep bun tin, filled about two-thirds. The second version's "rather more for a pudding" means a larger cup and a correspondingly longer bake.
- Oven heat"A quick oven" in this period is usually taken as somewhere around 400-450F (200-230C). Small sponge cakes of this size will colour fast at that heat; the first version gives no oven heat at all, only "about a quarter of an hour," and both are done when the centre springs back.
- Dried flourFlour was warmed briefly to drive off damp from storage, which helped it fold in without lumps. Modern flour needs only sieving.
- YieldThe second version gives ten or twelve small cakes; the recipe gives no yield for the first. Serve the buttered ones warm with marmalade on top.
- Wine sauceUsually a sweet pouring sauce of sugar, butter and a wine such as sherry or Madeira, served hot. It is what turns the same batter from a cake into a pudding.
The British Cookery Book belongs to the mid-Victorian wave of compilations that gathered receipts from correspondents and earlier printed sources, which is why so many entries carry a laconic "Another" with a second, differently proportioned version of the same thing. Both of these are true sponges in the older sense: leavening comes from air beaten into eggs, with no baking powder, so the batter is fragile and the instruction to put it in the oven "as soon as beaten" is the whole method in a phrase. The two finishes mark the two ends of their use: orange marmalade on top for the tea table, or a hot wine sauce poured over to serve them at dinner as a pudding.