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Three Egg Angel Food Cake
1 C sugar 1⅓ C Swans Down flour 12 t cream tartar 3 t Royal baking powder ⅓ t salt 2/3 C scalded milk part 1 t almond or vanilla extract Whites three eggs Mix and sift first five ingredients well. Add milk, cooled slightly, very slowly, beating continuously. Add flavoring, mix well and fold in beaten whites of eggs. Turn into ungreased angel cake tin and bake in very slow oven about 45 minutes. Remove from oven; invert pan and allow to stand until cold before removing from pan.
Mrs. C. I. Casey.
A thrifty stand-in for true angel food, which needs ten or twelve whites. Note that the fractions in the ingredient list have been mangled by the typesetter, and one line is plainly incomplete.
- The odd quantitiesThe milk line still reads "2/3 C scalded milk part," with a stray word carried over from the printed page; read it simply as ⅔ cup scalded milk, cooled slightly. Three teaspoons of baking powder is a great deal for a single cup of flour, so start with less. The salt was checked against the printed page and reads ⅓ teaspoon, as given here.
- Swans Down flourA bleached soft-wheat cake flour, still sold under the same name. Any cake flour works; all-purpose will give a coarser, tougher crumb, and if you use it, remove two tablespoons per cup.
- Royal baking powderIn this period Royal was a cream-of-tartar (tartrate) powder that reacted as soon as it was wetted. Modern double-acting powder is slower and generally stronger, so err on the low side of whatever the line calls for and get the batter into the oven without delay.
- Very slow ovenPeriod tables put this at roughly 250-300F. At the low end a milk-and-baking-powder cake this size can dry out over 45 minutes; 300-325F is closer to how the same batter would be baked now.
- Scalded milkScalding was routine before pasteurization was universal. Let the milk cool to warm before it goes into the dry ingredients, as the recipe says, or the hot batter will begin to set the egg whites you fold in afterward.
- Folding the whitesThis is the hinge. The whites are the only thing giving the cake its lift beyond the powder, so beat them to soft, glossy peaks and fold in three additions with a spatula, stopping while a few streaks remain. Beating them stiff and dry, or stirring them in, produces a flat, rubbery layer.
- Ungreased pan, invertedA tube pan with a removable bottom and no coating is correct; the batter must grip the sides as it sets. Invert the pan immediately on cooling and leave it until fully cold, then loosen with a thin knife.
- YieldProbably fills a small 8- or 9-inch tube pan and serves about 8. It is a plain white cake, good with fruit or a thin boiled icing rather than heavy frosting.
Angel food cake spread through American community cookbooks after the 1880s, when reliable fine-ground white flour, cheap refined sugar and rotary egg beaters made a cake leavened by egg white alone practical in a home kitchen. The catch was cost: a true angel food swallows a dozen whites and leaves the cook with a dozen yolks. "Three egg" versions like this one, propped up with milk and baking powder, were the compromise, and they show up under a range of names in church and club collections of the 1910s through the 1930s. The brand names are worth noticing too. Swans Down and Royal are named as if they were ingredients rather than products, which is how these subscription cookbooks worked: contributors wrote what was in the cupboard, and the milling and baking-powder companies had spent a generation making sure it was theirs.