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Mock Angel Food Cake
1 cup flour 1 cup sugar 1 cup milk Pinch of salt 1 teaspoon flavoring 3 teaspoons baking powder Whites of 2 eggs Sift the flour, sugar, salt and baking powder together four times. Heat the milk to scalding, and beat the egg whites stiff. Pour the scalding milk into the dry ingredients, stirring constantly, and fold in the stiffly beaten egg whites. Add the flavoring, and turn into an angel food cake pan. Bake in a moderate oven about thirty minutes.
A hot-milk cake dressed in angel food's clothing: two egg whites and baking powder standing in for the dozen whites a true angel food demands. The batter is thin and pourable, and the sifting is not optional.
- The hinge: sift four times, and mean itWith this much baking powder in one cup of flour, uneven distribution shows up as tunnels and a bitter, soapy patch. Four siftings is the only mixing this batter gets before the hot milk goes in.
- Moderate oven350F. Thirty minutes is about right for a 9-inch tube pan; test with a skewer in the thickest part, which should come out clean and the top spring back.
- Baking powder is stronger nowBaking powder proportions -- Three teaspoons to one cup of flour is high: cookbooks of the period more often specify 1 to 2 teaspoons per cup. Powders of the era were commonly single-acting, and formulations varied by brand, so exact equivalence is guesswork. If the full amount tastes metallic, reducing it is reasonable.
- "Flavoring"Period shorthand for vanilla or almond extract, occasionally lemon. One teaspoon of vanilla, or half vanilla and half almond, reads closest to the angel food it imitates.
- Scalding milkHeat until steam rises and bubbles form at the edge, around 180F, not a rolling boil. The hot liquid dissolves the sugar and pre-gelatinizes some starch, which is what gives these cakes their fine, tender crumb.
- The egg whites will deflate somewhatFolding stiff whites into hot batter is not a stable arrangement; expect to lose some volume. Fold quickly, stop while streaks are just gone, and get it into the oven at once.
- Angel food cake panA tube pan, probably 9 or 10 inches; the recipe does not say whether to grease it. Because the lift here comes from baking powder rather than a whipped-white foam, this cake does not need to cling to the sides to rise, so a lightly greased and floured tube pan turns out more reliably. There is no need to invert it to cool as you would a true angel food.
- YieldOne shallow tube cake; the quantities are small for a 9- or 10-inch pan, so expect a low ring rather than a tall one. It is plain by design and suits a glaze, a dusting of sugar, or fruit alongside.
"Mock" recipes are the clearest fingerprint of a thrift-minded kitchen, and versions of them appear across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, including in American cookbooks of the First World War years, when meatless and wheatless days and the campaign to conserve wheat, meat, fat and sugar pushed cooks toward substitutes. A genuine angel food cake takes ten to twelve egg whites; this one takes two, borrowing the tube pan, the white crumb and the name while doing the real work with baking powder and scalded milk. That it appears in what seems to be a chapter given over to leftover egg whites points to the other economy at play in these books: recipes were organized around using up what a previous dish had left behind, so a custard or a batch of noodles that swallowed the yolks handed the whites on to something like this. The hot-milk method itself long predates the war and survives in home baking as the hot milk sponge cake.