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White Sponge Cake
Mrs J. R. Silliman.
Take two tumblers of white pulverized sugar, one and a-half tumblers sifted flour, one teaspoonful cream tartar, whites of ten eggs beaten very stiff; then add the flour and sugar, and beat as little as possible; bake in a slow oven.
This is an early angel food cake in all but name: no butter, no yolks, no chemical leavening beyond a little cream of tartar to stabilise the whites. Nearly everything depends on how the whites are handled.
- The hinge: fold, don't beat"Beat as little as possible" is the whole recipe. Sift the flour and sugar over the stiff whites in several additions and fold with a spatula until just combined; any real beating knocks out the air that is the cake's only lift.
- TumblersA tumbler in these books is usually taken as about a half-pint, roughly 1 cup, though the actual glasses varied. Read it as about 2 cups sugar and 1 1/2 cups sifted flour, measured after sifting.
- Pulverized sugarThis means finely ground granulated sugar, closer to today's caster or superfine sugar than to confectioners' sugar, which is cut with cornstarch. Superfine dissolves into the whites without deflating them.
- Cream of tartarHere it acts as an acid stabiliser for the whites, not as a raising agent. Add it to the whites once they are foamy, before they stiffen, rather than sifting it in with the flour.
- A slow oven300-325F. Egg-white cakes brown and toughen quickly; the low heat sets the foam gradually. Expect 45 minutes to an hour in a tube pan, until the top springs back and a skewer comes out clean.
- The panUse an ungreased tube pan. The batter needs to climb the sides, and grease prevents that. Invert the pan onto a bottle or its own feet as soon as it comes out and leave it until fully cold, or the cake collapses under its own weight.
- Ten whitesThat is roughly 1 1/4 cups of egg white from modern large eggs. Whites separate more cleanly cold but whip to greater volume at room temperature, so separate them first and let them stand.
- Yield and servingA 10-inch tube pan, serving 10 to 12. Cut it with a serrated knife in a sawing motion; pressing down compresses the crumb. The book gives no flavouring, but a teaspoon of vanilla or a little lemon zest folded in at the end is period-appropriate.
The Home Cook Book belongs to the 1870s charity-cookbook mode, with each contribution signed by the donor, as this one is for Mrs J. R. Silliman; the Toronto edition of 1877 was credited to "ladies of Toronto and other chief cities and towns," and much of its content overlaps with an earlier Chicago compilation of the same title. Cakes leavened entirely by beaten egg whites appear across recipe collections of this generation under names like white cake, silver cake, snow cake and angel food, and they depended on the wider availability of finely refined white sugar and of cream of tartar, a byproduct of winemaking that gave home bakers a reliable acid. Pairing a white cake with a gold or sunshine cake using the leftover yolks was a common household economy, and recipes for the two are sometimes printed near one another. The absence of any flavouring or pan instruction here is typical of the format.