Thanks to the Women's Institute and wartime rationing, this sweet spongecake is now the bedrock of tea-time treats. Throughout our collective culinary and social history, there runs a thick seam of raspberry jam, sandwiched between two vanilla-scented sponge cakes. Afternoon tea would be unthinkable without it.
‘A real tea-time,’ noted Constance Spry in her cookbook of 1956, would consist of ‘one good plum cake, one light cake, perhaps of the sponge or sponge-sandwich variety...
a hot dish of crumpets or buttered toast, anchovy toast or hot tea-cakes’. Arguably, most of us would now drop the plum cake in favour of a showstopper (to use the term coined by The Great British Bake Off ) of a Victoria sponge. Although it was named for the sweet-toothed Queen, sponge cake pre-dates her reign by centuries and has gone through several iterations to become the airy, comforting treat we know today.
As Nigella Lawson points out in How to Be a Domestic Goddess , recipes don’t, ‘like Aphrodite, spring fully formed from their author’s forehead’. The first known reference to sponge cake appears in a book of 1615, The English Huswife , by Gervase Markham. His recipe contains flour, sugar and eggs, but no butter; he advises beating the eggs for ‘very near an hour’ to leaven the cake.
Yet, without butter and baking powder (for which we had to wait until the 1840s), the result would have been a flattish, biscuity affair. When Jane Austen wrote to her sister, Cassandra, in a .
