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Winter Sponge Cake
Mrs. Upham.
Take four eggs, two cups of sugar, two coffee cups of flour, two teaspoonsful cream tartar, two-thirds of a cup boiling water, and lemon to flavour; add the water last; pour into a pan and place into a well-heated oven. This, though apparently very thin, will come from the oven a most delightful cake.
A hot-water sponge, of the sort that relies on well-beaten eggs rather than on butter. The original gives no pan size, no timing and no method beyond the order of ingredients, so the notes below fill those gaps.
- Add the water last, and add it hotThe boiling water is what makes the batter look alarmingly thin, as the original itself warns. It is usually said to help the batter come together and the eggs hold their volume, though the receipt offers no explanation. Pour it in at the end, in a stream, while stirring, and get the pan into the oven promptly.
- Beat the eggs properlyThere is no butter and no soda here, so nearly all the lift comes from air beaten into the eggs. Whip whole eggs with the sugar until pale, thick and falling in ribbons, several minutes with an electric mixer, before any flour goes in.
- The coffee cupA nineteenth-century coffee cup is usually taken as about a standard cup, though household measures varied and no exact equivalence can be assumed. Start with two level cups of flour; the batter should pour, not drop.
- Cream of tartar without sodaTwo teaspoons of cream of tartar with no saleratus or soda to react with gives acid and tenderness rather than gas. Whether this reflects a wider habit or an omission in the printing cannot be settled from the page; either way, do not expect chemical leavening to rescue underbeaten eggs.
- A well-heated ovenThe original gives no temperature; for a sponge of this kind a moderate oven, around 350F, is the usual modern reading. Higher risks browning the thin batter before the centre sets.
- Pan and timingAn 8- or 9-inch square pan, or a 9-inch tube pan, greased and floured or lined. Bake 25 to 35 minutes, until the top springs back and a skewer comes out clean; a tube pan may want a few minutes more.
- Lemon to flavourA teaspoon of extract, or the grated zest of one lemon rubbed into the sugar first, which gives more perfume than extract does.
- YieldAbout eight to ten slices. Best the day it is baked; a butterless sponge stales quickly.
Hot-water sponge cakes appear all through late nineteenth-century American community cookbooks, usually under names like this one, and they belong to a moment when eggs did much of the work of leavening a batter. The Home Cook Book, compiled in the 1870s from contributions by named women, is a good specimen of the genre: each receipt carries its donor's name, here Mrs. Upham, and the collections were often sold to raise money for charitable causes. The "winter" in the title is harder to account for. The confident closing line promises that a batter so thin will nevertheless come out delightful.