Home › Cake Making and Baking › Angel Cake or Angel Food (No. 1)
Angel Cake or Angel Food (No. 1)
11 eggs (whites only) 1½ cups powdered sugar (sifted) 1 cup Five Roses flour 1 teaspoon cream of tartar 1 teaspoon vanilla Pinch of salt Sift flour, cream of tartar, sugar and salt together 4 or 5 times. Beat the egg whites in a large dish to a stiff froth. Add the sifted flour, etc., gradually, beating all the time. Have pan ready-do not let the cake stand a minute after it is mixed. Bake 45 minutes, and do not open the oven door until the cake has been in at least 15 minutes.
Add 2 teaspoons rose water, if desired.
A standard angel food, written for a cook who already knew what pan to use and how hot to set the oven. Two things need translating: the sugar and the flour.
- The hinge: fold, do not beatThe instruction to add the dry ingredients "beating all the time" may reflect a period when whites were often whipped stiffer and drier than we whip them now, though the book does not say so. Beat the whites only to firm, glossy peaks that still slump slightly, then fold the sifted mixture in by hand in three or four additions. Continued beating after the flour goes in will deflate the foam and give you a tough, shallow cake.
- "Powdered sugar"In Canadian and American books of this period powdered sugar means finely ground granulated sugar, roughly what is sold today as caster or superfine. It does not mean modern confectioners' sugar, which contains cornstarch and will give a pasty crumb here.
- The flourFive Roses was milled from hard spring wheat by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company and sold as a general household flour, stronger than modern cake flour. For angel food use cake flour; if you have only all-purpose, remove 2 tablespoons per cup and replace with cornstarch. Sifting four or five times is not fussiness — it is the only aeration the dry ingredients get.
- Cream of tartar placementThe recipe sifts the cream of tartar with the flour. Current practice adds it to the whites once they are frothy, before they stiffen, where it stabilises the foam from the start. Either works; the second is more reliable.
- Oven temperatureNone is given, which was normal for the period. Bake at 325°F for a large tube cake, 45 to 50 minutes, until the top springs back and a skewer comes out clean. The warning not to open the door for the first 15 minutes still stands — the foam sets in that window.
- The panA 10-inch ungreased tube pan with a removable bottom. The batter has to climb the sides, so no grease, no parchment, and no nonstick if you can avoid it.
- CoolingInvert the pan immediately and leave it upside down until completely cold, resting the tube on a bottle if the pan has no feet. Cooling right side up collapses the crumb. Run a thin knife around the sides to release.
- Eggs and yieldEleven whites from modern large eggs is about 1⅓ to 1½ cups. Measure by volume rather than count. The cake serves 10 to 12 and is best cut with a serrated knife or pulled apart with two forks.
- Rose waterTwo teaspoons is assertive by current standards, and rose waters vary a great deal in strength from brand to brand. Start with half a teaspoon alongside the vanilla and taste the batter.
Angel food appears in North American printed cookery from the last quarter of the nineteenth century, alongside cheap refined sugar, finely milled flour and the mechanical rotary egg beater, which made a cake raised entirely on whipped whites far less laborious in a home kitchen. The name is usually explained by the pale, weightless crumb, though that reading is traditional rather than documented, and the cake sits naturally beside the gold cakes in the same books, which use up yolks left behind. It appears here because the Five Roses Cook Book was published by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company, and books of that kind existed to show what their flour could do; a cake with one cup of flour and almost nothing else to hide behind was a fair test.