Home › Our Susan's Opinion of a Kitchen › Sponge Cake (II)
Sponge Cake (II)
Mrs. Upham.
The weight of eight eggs in sugar, half the weight in flour, and the juice and rind of one lemon; beat two eggs separately.
This is a weight-ratio sponge cake of the kind that assumes the cook already knows the method; almost everything but the proportions has been left out. Read it as a formula rather than a procedure.
- The hinge: air is the only leaveningThere is no baking powder, soda or butter here. The rise comes entirely from eggs beaten to a stable foam and flour folded in without deflating it, so fold with a spatula in as few strokes as will incorporate the flour and get the batter into the oven at once.
- Weighing the eggsThe recipe does not say whether the eggs are weighed in or out of the shell; the usual reading of such formulas is whole eggs in the shell. Eight modern large eggs in the shell run about 1 lb, which gives roughly 450-500 g (about 2 1/4-2 1/2 cups) sugar and half that, 225-250 g (about 2 cups), in flour. Nineteenth-century eggs were smaller, so weighing your own is the point of the method.
- "Beat two eggs separately"As printed this is ambiguous. It is commonly read as an instruction to beat yolks and whites apart -- the yolks with the sugar, the whites to a stiff froth -- and then combine them; a plain reading of "two eggs" reserved and beaten on their own is harder to square with the rest of the formula.
- FlourUse plain all-purpose flour, sifted two or three times. Household flour of the period was generally softer than modern all-purpose; if you have cake flour, it is probably closer to what Mrs. Upham had, and it makes a lighter crumb.
- LemonGrate the zest into the sugar so the oil is released, and add the juice to the yolks. A single lemon is the whole flavouring, so use an unwaxed one and take only the coloured part of the rind.
- OvenThe recipe gives no oven direction. A modern equivalent for a sponge of this kind is 325-350F. Hotter and the outside sets into a crust before the centre lifts.
- Pan and timingThis quantity fills a 10-inch tube pan or two 9-inch rounds. Expect 40-50 minutes for a tube pan, 25-30 for layers; it is done when the top springs back and a skewer comes out clean. Cool a tube cake upside down so it does not collapse under its own weight.
- Yield and servingTwelve to sixteen slices. It is a plain cake by design, meant to be eaten with fruit, cream or a glass of wine rather than iced.
The Home Cook Book (Chicago, 1870s) was one of the earliest American charity cookbooks, compiled from contributions by named local women, which is why this page reads as "Mrs. Upham" speaking in her own shorthand rather than as edited prose. Sponge cake recipes of this type descend from the older European biscuit tradition, where proportions were fixed by weighing the eggs themselves: matching sugar to their weight and taking half that in flour produced a consistent cake whatever the hens were doing that month. The absence of any chemical leavening is worth noting given that saleratus and, later, baking powder were widely available by this date; a true sponge was a demonstration of arm and technique, and cookbooks of the period often printed several versions in a row so a cook could choose between the beaten-egg kind and the quicker cup cakes.</p>