Coffee Sponge
Make an infusion with one-quarter of a pound of ground coffee; strain it through a cheese cloth bag. Then dissolve three-quarters of a pound of sugar in one pint of cream; add this to the yolks of six eggs; then put in the coffee and shake until of the consistency of lemon sponge. This may be piled high upon a dish and makes a most attractive and delicious dessert.
A late-Victorian coffee sponge that depends entirely on six raw egg yolks for its body, with no cooking step anywhere in the method. The safety problem and a structural problem sit in the same sentence.
- Raw yolks, never heatedThe yolks are added raw to the sweetened cream and coffee, and the mixture is only shaken. Nothing in the recipe brings the eggs anywhere near the 160F at which Salmonella is destroyed. Use a current recipe for a cooked custard or sabayon base instead.
- There is no setting agentA period "lemon sponge" was gelatin whipped to a foam as it chilled. This recipe borrows the description but includes neither gelatin nor a cooked custard, so the direction to shake until it holds a shape has nothing to work with. As printed it will not pile high; it will pour.
- The infusion is unquantifiedA quarter pound of ground coffee is given with no water measure at all, so the strength of the infusion — and the amount of liquid entering the mixture — is left entirely to the cook. That ambiguity cannot be resolved from the text.
- The sugar is not a misprintThree-quarters of a pound is about 1 3/4 cups, dissolved in a single pint of cream. Nineteenth-century cold sweets were generally sweeter than modern palates expect.
- "Shake" means a covered vesselThe instruction implies a lidded tin or covered jar shaken by hand rather than a whisk in an open bowl, though the text does not specify the vessel.
Coffee entered Anglo-American dessert cookery largely as a flavouring for cold sweets: coffee ice cream, coffee blancmange, coffee jellies and the whipped gelatin dishes called sponges. A sponge, in books of this period, generally meant a jelly base beaten as it cooled until it lightened in volume and turned opaque — lemon sponge was the familiar benchmark, which is why this recipe names it rather than describing the texture.