Snow Cake
Whites of 10 eggs. 1 1/2 cups of sugar. 1 cup of flour. 2 teaspoons of cream of tartar. Salt. Flavoring.
Rub the flour, cream tartar, sugar, and salt, well together. Add the eggs beaten light, and stir only sufficient to mix very lightly.--Mrs. G. P.
This is an early angel food cake, written for a cook who already knew what to do with a batter of beaten whites. The original gives no pan, no oven and no time, so those are the gaps worth filling.
- The hinge: fold, do not stir"Stir only sufficient to mix very lightly" is the whole recipe. Beaten whites are the only leavening. The original adds the beaten whites to the rubbed dry mixture; if you reverse that and sift the dry mixture over the whites in additions, fold with a spatula until no dry streaks remain. Any beating past that point deflates the cake.
- Beating the whitesTake the whites to soft, glossy peaks that just hold their shape, not stiff and dry. Older instructions to beat until the bowl can be inverted produce a foam that tears when folded. Whites at room temperature whip faster and to greater volume than cold ones.
- Cream of tartarTwo teaspoons is not a mistake and is not there for lift. It acidifies the whites so the foam is more stable and keeps the crumb white rather than yellowish. Modern angel food recipes use a broadly comparable, if usually somewhat smaller, proportion.
- FlourSouthern flour of this period was generally milled from softer, lower-protein wheat, closer to today's cake flour than to all-purpose. Use cake flour and sift it with the sugar and cream of tartar two or three times; the recipe's "rub well together" is doing the work of sifting.
- SugarThe 1 1/2 cups should be fine granulated or caster sugar. Coarse crystals will not dissolve in a foam batter and leave a gritty, weeping crust.
- Flavoring and salt"Flavoring" is left unspecified; a teaspoon of vanilla, lemon extract or rose water would suit. Salt is a pinch, roughly 1/4 teaspoon.
- Pan and ovenBake in an ungreased 9- or 10-inch tube pan at 325F for 35 to 45 minutes, until the top springs back and a skewer comes out clean. The batter must be able to climb the sides, so no grease and no flour in the pan.
- CoolingInvert the pan immediately and let the cake hang until completely cold, an hour or more. Cooling right side up collapses the crumb under its own weight. Loosen with a thin knife before turning out.
- YieldOne tube cake, 10 to 12 slices. Cut with a serrated knife or pull apart with two forks; a pressing cut compresses the crumb.
Snow cake belongs to the family of white cakes that spread through American cookbooks in the second half of the nineteenth century, the same line that produced angel food and silver cake. It is often said to have depended on the wider availability of finely milled white flour and cheap refined sugar, and it existed partly for thrift: a household making boiled custard, ice cream or lemon curd was left with a bowl of whites, and this used ten at once. Before the rotary egg beater came into common use, whipping that quantity by hand was a long job, which is one reason such cakes read as company food. Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1877), compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree from contributions by Virginia housewives, credits this one simply to "Mrs. G. P." hrough through the book and marks it as a community collection rather than a single author's work.