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Angels' Food Golden Cake
One tumbler flour, sifted four times, one and one-half tumblers of granulated sugar, sifted twice, the whites of three eggs and the yolks of eight, one teaspoon cream tartar, juice and rind of one lemon, one-half teaspoon of ammonia, which must be added last; bake in a tin pan with a tube and feet the same as for Angels' Food cake; do not grease the pan; bake about forty minutes, try it with a broom splint, and when done turn pan upside down as for Angles' Food.
A yolk-heavy companion to angel food, meant to use up the eight yolks left from a white cake. Two things in the original need decoding before you start: the tumbler and the ammonia.
- The ammonia is baker's ammoniaThis means powdered carbonate of ammonia, sold as hartshorn or baker's ammonia and still available from baking suppliers. It is not household ammonia solution, which is a cleaning product and must never go into food. If you cannot source the powder, use a current recipe rather than substituting blind.
- Ammonia in a tall cakeCarbonate of ammonia works best in thin, dry goods where the gas can escape completely. In a deep tube cake some ammonia smell can linger in the crumb.
- TumblerRead it as a standard cup, 8 fl oz. So about 1 cup flour and 1 1/2 cups granulated sugar. Tumblers varied between households, and this is the single genuinely loose measurement here.
- Oven temperatureNone is given. A foam cake of this depth wants 325-350F; 40 minutes at that heat is consistent with the stated time.
- The panA tube pan with feet is an angel food pan, the tube for heat in the centre and the feet so it can be inverted to cool while still in the tin. Do not grease it: the batter must grip the sides to hold its height.
- SiftingFour siftings of flour and two of sugar had a practical point. Period flour and granulated sugar were coarser and more prone to lumps than today's, and repeated sifting was the usual way to get flour fine and aerated and to break up the sugar.
- The broom splintA straw pulled from a new broom, used as a tester. A wooden skewer or a thin cake tester does the same job.
- CoolingInvert the pan the moment it leaves the oven and leave it until completely cold. A warm foam cake collapses under its own weight if turned out early.
- YieldThe recipe gives neither pan size nor yield. With one tumbler of flour and only three whites for lift, the batter is small by angel food standards and suits a smaller tube pan than a modern 9- to 10-inch one.
Angel food cake spread through American kitchens in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, helped along by the rotary egg beater, finely milled white flour and the tinware tube pan with its little feet. It left cooks with a bowl of yolks, and one answer was a second cake baked in the same pan on the same principle: golden cake, sometimes called sunshine cake, using most of the yolks and a few whites for lift. Pairing the two recipes, as this book does, is a piece of household economy as much as a menu.