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Angel Cake
Whites of eleven eggs, one and one-half cups granulated sugar sifted once, one cup of flour sifted with one teaspoon cream tartar four times, one teaspoon vanilla. Bake in ungreased pan forty minutes; when done invert pan on two cups and let it stand until cool.
— Mrs. James Holdridge
A classic angel food formula from the era when the cake was still a test of a cook's arm and her egg supply. The original assumes you know the oven and the method; here is what it leaves out.
- Oven temperatureNo heat is given. Angel cake of this proportion is usually baked at 325-350°F; forty minutes at 350°F in a tube pan is a reasonable reading of the instruction. Too hot and the crust sets before the foam has risen fully.
- Egg whitesEleven whites of the period come to roughly 1¼-1½ cups, which is near enough eleven to twelve modern large whites. Measure by volume rather than counting. They are best at room temperature and beaten only to firm, moist peaks -- beaten dry, the foam breaks and the cake falls.
- The hinge: fold, do not stirSugar and flour go in by folding, a third at a time, with a wide spatula. Everything else in this recipe is insurance for that one step; a stirred batter deflates and bakes into a rubber pad.
- Sifting the flour four timesNot fussiness. Flour of the period was less evenly milled than modern cake flour, and the repeated sifting with the cream of tartar both lightened it and distributed the acid. With modern cake flour, sifting three or four times still aerates.
- Cream of tartarHere it is sifted with the flour rather than beaten into the whites, as a number of period receipts do. Modern practice adds it to the whites early in beating, where it stabilises the foam more effectively.
- The panUngreased is essential — the batter climbs the sides as it rises and needs the grip. Use an ungreased two-piece tube pan, never nonstick, and never a bundt pan with a fluted pattern.
- Inverting on two cupsThe cooling cake must hang upside down or it collapses under its own weight. A modern tube pan with feet does the same job; otherwise invert the centre tube over a bottle neck and leave it at least an hour.
- YieldA 10-inch tube cake, 10 to 12 servings. Traditionally served plain or with fruit, since butter icing overwhelms it.
- The leftover yolksEleven of them. Yolk-rich cakes such as gold cake, and boiled custards, commonly appear alongside angel cake in period collections.
Angel cake -- later angel food cake -- appears in American cookbooks from the late 1870s and the 1880s onward, and its spread is usually linked to two things: the wider availability of purified cream of tartar, which here stabilises the whites rather than leavening the cake, and the rotary egg beater, which made a dozen whites a matter of minutes rather than a long stint with a fork or a birch whisk. Before that, a cake raised on nothing but beaten egg white was a demonstration piece. The name is generally taken to reflect the whiteness and the near-weightlessness, and angel cake was later set against "devil's food," the dark chocolate cake that became its counterpart. A contributor's name attached to so brief a set of instructions is typical of the community cookbook, a genre in which a woman's best-known dish circulated under her name.