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Sponge Cake (Break three eggs in a cup fill)
Break three eggs in a cup, fill the cup with sweet cream, one cup sugar, one cup flour, one teaspoon baking powder, a little salt, mix all together; flavor to taste and bake in a quick oven.
A one-cup recipe of the kind meant to be memorised rather than read: eggs plus cream to fill a cup, then a cup each of sugar and flour. It works, but two of its instructions need translating before you turn the oven on.
- The cup of eggs and creamBreak the eggs into a standard cup measure (8 fl oz / 240 ml) and pour in cream until the cup is full — three large eggs come to roughly 5 fl oz, so expect about 3 fl oz (6 tablespoons) of cream. The point is a fixed total volume of liquid, not a fixed amount of cream.
- Sweet cream"Sweet" here means fresh rather than soured or cultured, not sweetened. Heavy or whipping cream is the closest match to the unstandardised farm cream a recipe like this assumed.
- A quick ovenA "quick oven" is usually read as roughly 400-425F, which is hot for a cake of this size. For an 8-inch round or a small loaf, 375F is the practical reading of the instruction; in a much hotter oven the outside sets long before the centre.
- Baking timeNone is given. Reckon on 25–30 minutes for an 8-inch layer, 35–45 for a loaf, and test with a skewer in the middle.
- Flavour to tasteA teaspoon of vanilla, or the grated zest of a lemon, suits the batter. Lemon and almond extracts were also common flavourings of the period.
- Not a sponge in the modern senseThe eggs are not separated and no air is beaten into them separately; the lift comes from the baking powder, with the cream supplying fat and richness rather than lift. Beat the eggs, sugar and cream well before folding in the flour, or the crumb turns dense.
- Pan and yieldAbout 3 cups of batter — one 8-inch round layer, a 8x4 loaf, or a dozen cupcakes. Grease and flour the tin; the recipe assumes you know to.
Nineteenth-century American cookbooks are full of "cup cakes" like this one, built on a ratio a cook could hold in her head — a cup of this, a cup of that, one teaspoon of leavening — in an era when scales were said to be uncommon in home kitchens and printed recipes circulated by word of mouth and newspaper column. The name "sponge cake" was applied loosely: a true sponge depends on eggs beaten to a foam, but the term is often said to have drifted over time to cover almost any light, plain, unfrosted cake, especially once chemical baking powder made the older labour of whisking eggs for half an hour unnecessary. The call for sweet cream points to a household with its own dairy or a reliable milkman, and it supplies what little fat the batter carries — which is why this batter needs no shortening at all.