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Feather Cake
3 eggs. 1/8 t salt. 1 1/2 C flour. 1 C sugar. 1/2 C boiling water 2 t baking powder 1/4 t lemon and almond flavoring Separate eggs. Beat yolks and add one-half of sugar. Beat again. Add boiling water, flavoring, baking powder and flour. Add salt to egg whites. Beat until stiff, add remaining half of sugar, and beat well.. Fold into first mixture. Bake 30 minutes at 350 degrees. Harriet L. Hudson. 1% C sifted Swansdown flour 1⅔ C sugar ½ t salt 2 t baking powder
The ingredient list has been mangled in transcription — quantities are scattered and the eggs never got a number — so read the method first and reconstruct the list from it. What you have is a hot-water sponge, closer to a chiffon than to a butter cake.
- Amounts to watchThe salt reads half a teaspoon, matching the printed page. "1% C sifted Swansdown flour" is still garbled and is most likely 1 1/2 cups, though 1 1/4 is possible. The egg count is missing entirely; a hot-water sponge with this much flour would take about 3 eggs, so 3 is the safer reading.
- Swans Down flourStill sold, and still a bleached soft-wheat cake flour. Any cake flour works; if you substitute all-purpose, use 1 1/2 cups less 3 tablespoons. Sift it, as directed — the aeration is doing real work here.
- Boiling water in the yolksThis is the hinge. The water must be at a full boil and beaten into the yolk-sugar mixture in a thin stream while the beater runs, so the yolks thicken and pale rather than scramble. It is what makes the crumb "feather."
- Baking powder with the flourThe original lists baking powder alongside the flour in a single instruction (and the transcription repeats the 2 teaspoons twice). Whisk it into the sifted flour before adding, so it distributes evenly rather than sitting in pockets.
- Sugar split in twoHalf goes into the yolks, half into the whites after they reach stiff peaks — the second addition turns the whites into a meringue that carries the batter. Do not consolidate the sugar into one addition.
- Flavoring"1/4 t lemon and almond flavoring" may mean a quarter teaspoon of each or a quarter teaspoon of the two together. Almond extract is potent, so a scant 1/4 teaspoon is plenty.
- Pan and yieldNo pan is named. A batter of this size fits an 8-inch square or a 9-inch round, greased and floured, and serves 8 or 9. Thirty minutes at 350F suits either; test at 25 minutes.
- FoldingFold the meringue into the yolk base in three additions with a spatula, turning the bowl. There is no added fat in the batter to hold air, so anything beaten out is gone for good.
Feather cake is a name that turns up again and again in American church and club cookbooks from roughly the 1890s through the 1940s, applied loosely to any cake meant to be conspicuously light — more often, as here, a hot-water sponge. The naming of a brand in the ingredient list is characteristic of the period: Swans Down cake flour was heavily promoted to home bakers with its own recipe pamphlets, and contributors to fundraising cookbooks copied the brand along with the method, so the flour company's advertising ended up preserved in a community collection.