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Cherry Angel Cake
C egg whites ¾ C flour (Swans Down) 14 t salt 1 t cream of tartar 1 C sugar Add the salt to the eggs, beat till frothy, add cream of tartar and beat stiff. Add cherry syrup, fold in flour, reserving 1 T to coat cherries, 1/3 C sliced maraschino cherries 1 t maraschino syrup and lastly the cherries. Bake as angel food.
Mrs. Geo. Ives.
A variation on plain angel food, written for cooks who already knew the master recipe by heart. The measurements are abbreviated in the usual church-cookbook shorthand, and the baking instruction is simply a cross-reference.
- QuantitiesRead the abbreviations as cups (C), teaspoons (t) and tablespoons (T). A cup of egg whites is roughly eight to ten large whites, and the whites should stand at room temperature before beating.
- Swans DownA brand of soft-wheat cake flour, still sold. Any cake flour works; do not substitute all-purpose, which has too much protein for a foam cake. Sift it two or three times before measuring.
- The sugarThe method never says where it goes. In angel food practice it is usually beaten into the whites gradually once they hold soft peaks, though many recipes sift a portion of it with the flour instead; either way, add it before the flour rather than after.
- Cream of tartarNot optional. It stabilises the whites and keeps the crumb white rather than beige. Use a spotlessly clean bowl and beater, since any trace of fat will stop the whites from mounting.
- Coating the cherriesThe reserved tablespoon of flour keeps the sliced maraschinos suspended rather than sinking to the bottom. Blot them dry on paper first, or the syrup will make the flour slide off.
- FoldingSift the flour over the meringue in three additions and fold with a wide spatula, cutting down through the centre and turning the bowl. Stop the moment no dry streaks remain.
- "Bake as angel food"The recipe gives no temperature or time, only a cross-reference to the master recipe. Angel food is generally baked in an ungreased tube pan in a moderate oven, around 325 to 350F, for something like 40 to 45 minutes, until the top springs back. The batter needs to climb the bare sides of the pan, so grease nothing.
- CoolingInvert the pan immediately over a bottle neck or on its own feet and leave it until stone cold, or the cake collapses under its own weight. Loosen with a thin knife before turning out.
- YieldThe quantities are modest for an angel food, so expect a smaller cake - a 9-inch tube pan rather than a 10-inch - and perhaps eight to ten slices. It is pink-flecked and pale, and wants nothing more than a thin maraschino glaze if anything at all.
Angel food belongs to the era when cake flour, a good wire whisk and later the rotary egg beater made a white foam cake possible in an ordinary kitchen, and it is generally said to have spread through American community cookbooks around the turn of the twentieth century as a showpiece for a careful baker. A cake like this one would often have been made alongside something rich in yolks, since eight or ten whites had to come from somewhere. The maraschino cherries point to a twentieth-century date, bottled, brightly dyed cherries in sugar syrup being an industrial novelty of the period and, by most accounts, especially common in American pantries between the wars, folded into everything from salads to icings. The brand name in the ingredient list is typical of church-supper collections, where contributors wrote down exactly what stood on their own shelf, and Swans Down had long marketed itself to home bakers as a flour for delicate cakes.