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Jelly Roll
Put one pound of sugar and twelve ounces of butter into a basin, beat them to a cream, add eight or nine eggs beaten to a froth, sift in one pound of flour, and work the whole to a smooth batter, adding the juice and grated rind of a lemon. Put a sheet of well-buttered paper into a baking-tin, spread the batter over this to about one-fourth inch in thickness, and bake in a hot oven to a light brown. Remove it, mask the surface with thick jelly, roll it up and tie it until it becomes set and fast. Take off the strings, brush the roll with the beaten white of an egg mixed with a little syrup, roll it in granulated sugar, and serve.
This is a hotel-scale batter — closer to a pound cake than a modern sponge — baked thin and rolled. The single thing that decides success is rolling it while it is still warm and pliable.
- Scale and yieldA pound of sugar, a pound of flour, 12 oz butter and eight or nine eggs is roughly four times a household jelly roll. At the specified quarter inch it should fill close to two half-sheet pans (13x18 in), giving two rolls of a dozen or so slices each. Halving or quartering the recipe should work without adjustment.
- "A hot oven"Read this as somewhere in the 400-450F range. A quarter-inch sheet at that heat colors lightly in roughly 8 to 12 minutes; go by the pale gold surface and a top that springs back, not the clock. Overbaking is a common cause of cracking when the sheet is rolled.
- Buttered paperParchment does the job the buttered paper did, and still wants buttering. Leave an overhang on the long sides so you can lift the whole sheet out at once.
- Roll it warmTurn the cake out, peel the paper, spread the jelly and roll within a few minutes of it leaving the oven. Cooled, this butter-rich batter sets firm and splits along the outside of the curl. If it must wait, roll it bare in a towel first, then unroll, fill, and re-roll.
- "Mask with thick jelly"Mask means to coat the surface evenly. Use a firm, well-set jelly or a thick preserve, warmed just enough to spread — about a cup per sheet. Anything loose will run out the ends under pressure.
- Tying itThe strings held the roll while the cake and jelly set. Wrapping snugly in parchment or a clean towel and chilling 30 minutes does the same and leaves no marks.
- The egg-white glazeThe final brushing of beaten raw egg white with syrup is never cooked. Skip it and dust with sugar, or use pasteurized egg white if you want the sugar to adhere.
- LemonZest the lemon before juicing and add both at the end, as written; the added juice will loosen the batter slightly, which is expected.
The jelly roll belongs to a family of rolled filled cakes found in European and American baking from the middle of the nineteenth century onward, sold variously as Swiss roll, roulade, or simply jelly cake. Oscar Tschirky's collection was published in 1896, and its quantities generally reflect hotel rather than household practice — a pound of flour at a time, the batter spread on paper across a baking tin, the finished rolls glazed and sugared for display. It is also worth noting how much butter this version carries; many jelly rolls of the period were made with a foam sponge and no butter at all, which is why the modern jelly roll is springier and more forgiving than the rich, tender cake described in this recipe.