Angel Cake
+ teaspoon salt 1 teaspoon cream of tartar 1 teaspoon vanilla Beat egg whites on platter with wire beater. When foamy, add cream of tartar; when stiff, add sugar gradually. Sift flour four times with salt. Cut and fold into egg mixture. Add vanilla, bake one hour in moderate oven in angel cake pan. Invert pan on cake cooler and allow it to drop out itself. If too brown, wrap in wet cheese cloth for ten minutes; then brown may be easily removed. 1 cup sugar 5 egg yolks + teaspoon salt cup flour
The page has come through the scanner badly: the egg whites are missing entirely from the ingredient list, the fraction marks have been flattened to "+" signs, and a stray line for a companion gold cake has been swept in at the end. What follows sorts out what is usable.
- The missing quantityNo amount of egg white is given, and the sugar and flour quantities for this cake are missing too, which makes the recipe unbuildable as printed. Angel cakes of the period generally call for the whites of 10 to 12 eggs, about 1 1/4 to 1 1/2 cups. The "+ teaspoon salt" is probably 1/4 teaspoon, though 1/2 cannot be ruled out.
- The trailing line"1 cup sugar 5 egg yolks + teaspoon salt cup flour" does not belong to this cake; it reads as the beginning of a yolk cake swept in from adjacent text. Ignore it here.
- Oven"Moderate oven" is usually read as about 350F, though the book does not define it. For a full hour, 325F is the safer reading for a tall tube cake; at 350F an angel cake of this size is often done in 35 to 45 minutes, tested by a top that springs back.
- FlourSifting four times aerates the flour and breaks up lumps, which is the likely reason for the repetition. Use cake flour, measure by spooning into the cup and levelling, and sift with the salt as directed.
- Beating on a platterWhites were beaten flat on a large platter with a wire beater, a method that brought in air quickly and stayed in use alongside rotary beaters. A stand mixer does the same work; take the whites to firm, not dry, peaks, and add the sugar in a slow stream once they hold shape.
- The panAn angel cake pan is an ungreased tube pan with a removable centre. Do not grease it and do not use a nonstick one if you can avoid it — the batter must grip the sides to climb.
- CoolingInverting the pan and letting the cake drop out on its own is the hinge of the whole recipe. A warm angel cake will collapse under its own weight; leave it hanging upside down until completely cold, an hour or more.
- The cheesecloth trickWrapping an over-browned cake in wet cheesecloth steams the crust loose so it can be rubbed off. It works, and it also softens the surface, so serve promptly afterward.
- YieldNo pan size is given; a standard 10-inch tube cake would serve 10 to 12. Cut with a serrated knife or pull apart with two forks rather than pressing down with a blade.
Angel cake — angel food, in most American books — belongs to the second half of the nineteenth century, when cheap chemically pure cream of tartar and finely milled white flour made a fat-free, egg-white-only cake practical in a home kitchen. It is often said to have arisen in Pennsylvania and the Midwest, where it appears in community and church cookbooks from the 1870s and 1880s, though that origin is folk tradition rather than established fact; the cake was prized for exactly the qualities its name advertises: white, weightless, and conspicuously extravagant with eggs. That extravagance explains the yolk cake stranded at the bottom of this page. A thrifty household never made angel cake alone; the leftover yolks went into a gold cake, a custard, or a boiled dressing. Lowney's, a chocolate company issuing a cook book to sell cocoa, included a plain white cake all the same.