Jelly Roll
1 cup flour 1½ teaspoons baking powder teaspoon salt 3 tablespoons milk Beat eggs, add sugar and beat well. Add lemon rind. Sift flour with baking powder and salt; add alternately with the milk. Bake 15 to 20 minutes at a temperature of 360°F. in greased bread pan and turn out on a damp cloth. Spread with jelly and roll. Dredge top with powdered sugar.
The ingredient list has come through incomplete — the eggs, sugar and lemon rind called for in the method never appear with quantities, and a second, unrelated list (shortening, sugar, milk, flour) has been appended from an adjacent recipe. Treat what follows as guidance for reading the page rather than a working formula.
- Missing quantitiesThe method calls for eggs, sugar and lemon rind, none of which are given amounts. Comparable sponges of the type are commonly built on three or four eggs and something under a cup of sugar to the cup of flour, but the book does not say so and the figures should not be invented from the page as printed.
- The stray second listThe trailing "cup shortening, 1½ cups sugar, ½ cup milk, 2 cups flour" looks like a butter-cake formula, most likely run in from a neighbouring entry. It does not belong to this jelly roll, which is a fatless cake raised by beaten egg and, here, by baking powder as well.
- "Teaspoon salt"Printed without a fraction. A quarter or half teaspoon is the likely intention; a full teaspoon in 1 cup of flour would be aggressively salty.
- 360°FAn oddly precise figure, of the sort that presupposes a thermometer or a thermostatic oven. Set a modern oven to 350°F or 375°F; the difference is immaterial.
- "Greased bread pan"Read this as a shallow rectangular sheet, not a loaf tin — a quarter sheet or 10x15-inch jelly roll pan lined with greased paper. The batter should go in no more than about ¼ inch deep or it will crack when rolled.
- The damp clothThe point of turning out onto a damp cloth is to keep the sheet pliable. As printed, the cake is turned out hot, spread with jelly and rolled at once; some cooks instead roll it in the cloth first, then unroll, fill and re-roll. Either way it must be rolled while hot, since a sponge allowed to cool flat will split along the outside curve.
- The jellyBeat the jelly smooth with a fork or spoon before spreading. Straight from the jar it tears the hot crumb, and it should go on in a thin layer stopping an inch short of the far edge.
- YieldOne roll of roughly 8 to 10 slices.
The jelly roll is the American branch of a family that includes the English Swiss roll and the French gâteau roulé, all of them rolled sponges that became common in print in the second half of the nineteenth century once chemical leavening and reliable ovens put a light egg cake within reach of the ordinary household. Its virtue was economy: a single cup of flour and whatever jelly the pantry held from last summer's fruit, dressed up with a dusting of powdered sugar into something fit for company.