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Velvet Sponge Cake
Two cups sugar, six eggs leaving out the whites of three, one cup boiling hot water, two and one half cups flour, one table-spoon baking-powder in the flour; beat the yolks a little, add the sugar and beat fifteen minutes; add the three beaten whites, and the cup of boiling water just before the flour; flavor with a tea-spoon lemon extract and bake in three layers, putting between them icing made by adding to the three whites of eggs beaten to a stiff froth, six dessert-spoons of pulverized sugar to each egg, and lemon to flavor. -Mrs. Wm. Brown, Massillon.
The cake itself is a sound hot-water sponge, but the filling between the layers is uncooked egg white and sugar, never heated at any point. That part should not be made from these instructions.
- Why the cautionThe icing is three raw egg whites beaten with powdered sugar and spread cold between cooled layers. Nothing brings it to a temperature that would deal with Salmonella, and a sugar-and-egg filling sitting at room temperature is a hospitable place for it. Use a current recipe for any uncooked or lightly cooked meringue filling.
- The egg arithmeticSix eggs, whites of three left out: the batter takes six yolks and three whites, and the other three whites are set aside for the filling. The recipe is written so that nothing is wasted, which is why the icing exists at all.
- Fifteen minutes of beatingWith the whisks and rotary beaters of the period, long beating was how air was built into a cake with almost no fat. A stand mixer on high will usually reach the same pale, thick, ribbon stage well short of a quarter hour, and the full fifteen minutes risks overworking it.
- The boiling waterThis is the hinge. A cup of boiling water beaten into the sugared yolks immediately before the flour goes in is what distinguishes this style of sponge and is usually credited with the velvet crumb, though the mechanism is not settled. The recipe is explicit that the water goes in just before the flour.
- Dessert-spoonsA dessert-spoon sits between a teaspoon and a tablespoon, roughly two teaspoons or 10 ml. Six per egg for three eggs is about three-quarters of a cup of sugar in total.
- Pulverized sugarConfectioners' or powdered sugar. Period pulverized sugar was often crushed at home from loaf sugar and did not contain the cornstarch added to the modern product.
- Baking-powderA tablespoon to two and a half cups of flour is heavy by modern standards; period powders were single-acting and generally less brisk. At that rate a modern double-acting powder may give a coarser crumb and a faintly metallic edge.
- Oven and pansThe original gives no temperature because it assumes a range judged by experience. The recipe does not specify pan size. For three layers of a sponge this light, a moderate oven, around 350F, for roughly 20 to 25 minutes, until the top springs back.
The Dixie Cook-Book carries a Southern title but a great many of its contributors, like Mrs. Wm. Brown of Massillon, are from Ohio: it was compiled by Estelle Woods Wilcox and draws on much the same body of material as her Buckeye Cookery, reset and marketed to a different region. Hot-water sponges were common in that generation of American community cookbooks, a period that also coincided with the spread of reliable commercial baking powder. The name "velvet" is usually taken to describe the crumb; recipes titled velvet cake, silver cake and sunshine cake proliferated in these books, distinguished mostly by which parts of the egg went where. Uncooked white-of-egg icing appears frequently in such collections, an economical way to use the whites the batter left over.