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Sponge Cake (IV)
Mrs. H. Baird.
Five eggs, one and one half cups of flour, one and one-half cups of sugar, one-third cup of water, one-quarter teaspoon soda, one-half cream of tartar; flavour with lemon.
This is a contributor's shorthand: a list of proportions with no method, no pan and no oven. The proportions are sound, but everything about the execution has to be supplied.
- The missing unit"One-half cream of tartar" almost certainly means half a teaspoon, matching the quarter teaspoon of soda in the line before it. That 2:1 ratio of acid to soda is the usual home-mixed leavening of the period, and together they do the work of about a teaspoon of modern baking powder.
- The hinge is the eggsWith five eggs to a cup and a half of flour and almost no fat, the lift is mechanical. Beat the yolks with the sugar until pale and ribboning, whip the whites to soft peaks separately, and fold rather than stir. If the whites are deflated the cake will be a dense sheet, whatever the soda does.
- OvenA sponge of this size is best baked around 350F, what period recipes generally describe as a moderate oven; anything quicker sets the crust before the batter has finished rising.
- Pan and timeA 9-inch tube pan, ungreased so the batter can climb the sides, or two 8-inch rounds. Roughly 30-35 minutes in the tube pan, 20-25 in the layers, until the top springs back.
- FlourHousehold flour of the period varied a good deal and was often softer than modern all-purpose. Cake flour, or all-purpose with two tablespoons per cup swapped for cornstarch, will give a finer crumb.
- Flavour with lemonGrated zest of one lemon rubbed into the sugar, or a teaspoon of extract. Zest into the sugar releases far more oil than adding it to the finished batter.
- CoolingInvert the pan and let the cake hang until cold. A hot sponge left sitting upright compresses under its own weight.
- YieldOne tube cake or two thin layers; ten to twelve slices. Serves plainly, with fruit or whipped cream, as it would have been in 1877.
The Home Cook Book was compiled in Toronto in 1877 by "ladies of Toronto and chief cities and towns in Canada," sold to raise money for the Hospital for Sick Children, and it is one of the earliest Canadian examples of the charity or community cookbook — a genre in which every recipe carries a contributor's name. That format explains the terseness here: Mrs. Baird was writing for neighbours who already knew how a sponge cake was made and needed only her proportions. The soda-and-cream-of-tartar pairing dates the entry as much as the name does; commercial baking powder existed by the 1870s, but recipes of this kind still called for the acid and the alkali to be measured separately. Sponge cakes are often said to have appealed in this period because they used no butter, relying on egg volume alone, which made them a lighter and cheaper alternative to pound cake.