One of the specialties of the cake shop at number 296 Bridge Road, Richmond was the cream sponge – at least, that’s what everyone called it, but more correctly it was the creamed sponge. Personally, I was never a fan - I thought the sponges gave off a rather unpleasant “eggy” smell, and anyway I much preferred cakes of a denser texture. The smell, I always assumed, was due to the frozen egg pulp that was a principal ingredient.
In those days (the late 1940s and the 1950s) the marketing of eggs was strictly controlled by and channelled through the Egg and Egg Pulp Marketing Board. As the Board’s name indicates, egg pulp was a significant part of the egg industry, and the Board distributed its pre-shelled eggs in oblong-shaped four (or was it five?) gallon tins. This saved bakers and pastry-cooks from having to shell large numbers of eggs and, incidentally, meant that large-quantity recipes listed eggs by volume rather than by number. In the bakehouse the egg pulp was glugged out of the tin into a large measuring jug and then into the mixing machine. The pulp arrived frozen, and couldn’t be decanted until it had thawed somewhat, so there was always a stock of egg pulp tins in the cool-room. At any one time only one tin had been opened and was in use in the bakehouse, and it stayed out of the cool-room and wasn’t put away until the end of the day’s work.
Why it was so I don’t know, but the egg pulp – even from a freshly-tapped tin - always smelt really bad, and the odour didn’t improve through being left unrefrigerated during the day. Curiously, the pulp never seemed to deteriorate: today we would automatically assume that it was laced with preservative, but back then surely not! It was my job, after school or at the weekend, to hose the pulp remnants from the empty tins.
After each tin was finished the pastry-cooks cut out the top, and their oblong shape meant that the cleaned tins were easy to place on a shelf; and they were used extensively in the bakehouse to store various ingredients - the fruit mince, for instance. Other than prior to the Christmas season, mince pies were not a popular item, and were made irregularly on a needs basis. The fruit mince itself was prepared very occasionally, in bulk, and the supply languished in a corner of the bakehouse in a former egg pulp tin, covered with a hessian bag to keep the bakehouse flour from settling. And even when the mince did accumulate a light crust of white, a quick stir with a stick was all it took to prepare the delicious mixture for ladling into the shortbread bases.
Given the years that the bakehouse had been operating, there was rarely need for a new storage tin, so my after-school chore was really to clean the tins for the man who came from time-to-time to take them away. I don’t remember why the tins were collected, but it certainly wasn’t for scrap metal, otherwise we would simply have crushed them, and I wouldn’t have had to clean them first. But I do remember that the stack of tins awaiting collection was sometimes huge, stretching along and up the high brick wall of the next-door factory.
All of this has been by way of digression from the issue of why to me the sponges smelt unpleasant. Perhaps the smell wasn’t the latent whiff of egg pulp at all. It’s possible that the smell was the smell of margarine – not so much the margarine that was in the sponge mixture, but the margarine that was used to grease the sponge tins. Again “in those days” there were entrenched restrictive trade practices. The dairy industry lobby had ensured that margarine had to be labelled as “cooking” margarine, and that it was not allowed to be coloured to look like butter. It was white, like copha, and consequently was rarely used as a table substitute for butter. However, it was widely used by bakers and pastry-cooks; and at the shop there was always a big block – 56 pounds, I think – in the cool-room or on the bench. From time to time a hunk of margarine was melted in a metal jug, and was then used for greasing tins and trays.
The standard oven tray accommodated about eighteen sponge tins, and when cooked the sponges were simply tipped on to the bench or a rack to cool. They never stuck to the cake tins, maybe because the tins had been so liberally coated with melted margarine, or maybe because the tins had never been washed. They were black with usage.
It was not customary to sell single-layer sponges, and typically the sponges in the display cases and in the shop window comprised two sponge cakes with cream between, and with the top iced and lightly decorated – with a fringe of hundreds-and-thousands, for instance. Sometimes there was simply a sprinkling of caster sugar instead of icing.
The sponges we sold to Lin Glazier were different though. I call him Lin now, but then he was always Mr. Glazier. He was our most faithful customer. He and his wife operated the Wattle Park Chalet. The Chalet was and is a Tudor-style oddity within the natural bushland of Wattle Park
The Wattle Park Arlington – surely a strange choice of name given that the world’s best known Arlington is the American National Cemetery in Virginia
Mr. Glazier used to buy several dozen sponges at a time, undecorated, and we provided flat wooden boxes for transportation. He collected the sponges himself, and was thus a regular caller at the shop. He was tall and lean, in his 40s through 50s I suppose, and very formal. He and my dad eventually got on to Lin and Gordon terms, but it took some time.
When Mr Glazier learned of my impending trip to the UK London University of London Royal College
As to Mr Glazier: we lost track after leaving Richmond
Gary Andrews
12 January, 2011
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