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Lovely Sponge Cake
Mrs. J. D. King.
One pound of sugar, one-half pound of flour, ten eggs, one grated lemon; beat sugar and yolks to a cream, whites to a stiff froth; add lemon to the sugar and eggs when beaten. Takes two persons to make it.
A true foam cake: no butter, no baking powder, and no liquid beyond the eggs and lemon. Everything depends on how much air you beat in and how little of it you knock out again.
- The measures in cupsOne pound of sugar is about 2 1/4 cups granulated; half a pound of flour is roughly 1 3/4 cups of modern all-purpose, spooned and levelled. Weighing is far more reliable here, since the whole structure is a fixed ratio of sugar and flour to ten eggs.
- Eggs then and nowEggs of the period were probably smaller than today's large, likely nearer what we now call medium. Eight to nine large eggs will give roughly the same volume, about 500 g of egg in the shell.
- "One grated lemon"This most likely means the grated rind, not the juice or the pulp. Rub the zest into the sugar before beating so the oils disperse through the mixture.
- The missing stepThe original never says to combine, and never mentions the flour again. The intended order is: beat yolks and sugar to a thick pale cream, beat whites to a stiff froth, fold the whites into the yolk mixture, then sift the flour over in several additions and fold just until no streaks remain.
- Why two peopleTen eggs beaten by hand with a whisk or a wire birch broom was long, hard work, and the whites had to be folded in while still foaming. A stand mixer and a hand mixer, or one machine and a large bowl worked in sequence, does the job alone.
- Pan and ovenBake in an ungreased tube pan of about 10 inches, so the batter can climb the sides. The recipe gives no oven direction; 325 to 350F for 45 to 55 minutes suits a cake of this type, until the top springs back and a skewer comes out clean.
- CoolingInvert the pan immediately and let the cake hang until completely cold. A sponge with no fat and no chemical leavening will collapse under its own weight if cooled upright.
- YieldA tall cake serving 12 to 16. It stales quickly; it is at its best the day it is made, and is traditionally served plain or with fruit rather than iced.
The Home Cook Book was compiled from contributions by ladies of Toronto and first published in 1877, part of a wave of North American charity cookbooks in which each recipe carried the name of the woman who gave it, as Mrs. J. D. King's does here. Sponge cakes were demanding baking: with no chemical leavening and no butter, the result rested on the cook's arm and her judgment of the oven, and the frank note that it "takes two persons to make it" is an unusually candid admission of the labour involved. Recipes of this type are generally traced to the egg-foam cakes of Renaissance Italy and Spain, which reached English kitchens as the biscuit and the Savoy cake; by the nineteenth century sponge formulas built on a fixed weight of sugar and flour to a set number of eggs were common on both sides of the Atlantic, with lemon among the usual flavourings.