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Angel Cake (Whites of to eggs Pinch)
Whites of 8 to 10 eggs Pinch of salt 1/2 teaspoon cream of tartar Sift the flour four or five times before measuring; then sift and measure the sugar. Add the salt to the eggs; beat them to a froth; add cream of tartar and beat until very stiff. Stir in sugar; then flour, very lightly. Put in a pan in the pastry rack and bake between two moderately hot radiators. 2 eggs 1 cup sugar 1 cup flour SPONGE CAKE No. 1 2 teaspoons baking powder 1/2 cup hot milk 1 teaspoon flavoring Beat the yolks; stir into them the sugar and beaten whites; then fold in the flour and baking powder, well sifted. Add the hot milk and flavoring and bake for thirty minutes, using both radiators. SPONGE CAKE No. 2 4 eggs 1 cup sugar Juice and rind of 1/2 lemon 1 cup flour Beat the yolks and whites of the eggs separately. Into the yolks stir the sugar, lemon and whites; then fold in the flour. Bake between two moderately hot radiators for twenty-five minutes.
Three cakes run together on one leaf, and the type has been scrambled in places: the ingredient lists have drifted away from the methods they belong to. Read the quantities with suspicion before you commit eggs to a bowl.
- The garbled quantitiesThe angel cake method calls for flour and sugar that its own list never gives; the "2 eggs 1 cup sugar 1 cup flour" line clearly belongs to Sponge Cake No. 1, which is then followed by its own baking powder, milk and flavoring. For 8 to 10 whites, an angel cake of this period would normally take about 1 cup sifted flour and 1 1/4 to 1 1/2 cups sugar, but that is reconstruction, not what the page says.
- "Radiators"This is fireless cookery: the radiators are the soapstone or cast iron discs heated on the stove, then dropped into the insulated cooker above and below the pan. "Moderately hot" means heated through but not red hot. The book gives no temperature and no firm oven equivalent can be assigned, particularly as the heat falls steadily while the stones give up their warmth.
- Translating to a real ovenNone of these need a fireless cooker. Angel cake bakes at 325 to 350F for 35 to 45 minutes in an ungreased tube pan; the two sponge cakes at 350F for the twenty-five to thirty minutes given. The times in the original assume falling heat, so watch the cakes rather than the clock.
- Sifting flour four or five timesNot superstition. Soft flour of this period was less uniformly milled than modern cake flour, and repeated sifting was the usual way to lighten and break it up enough to fold into meringue without deflating it. Cake flour sifted once, then measured by spooning into the cup, will generally do the same job.
- Measure after sifting, not beforeThe instruction is explicit and matters: sift, then measure. Scooping the cup into the bag can pack in 20 to 25 percent more flour, which risks a tough, sunken angel cake.
- Cream of tartarHalf a teaspoon for 8 to 10 whites is on the low side by current practice, which runs closer to a teaspoon for that many. The acid stabilises the foam; without it the whites are less stable and more likely to slacken or weep as the sugar goes in.
- The hot milk in Sponge No. 1Adding hot milk last is the hinge of that cake — it thins the batter so the flour disperses, and it is what makes a hot-milk sponge tender rather than rubbery. Add it quickly and get the pan into the heat before the foam settles.
- CoolingAngel cake must cool inverted, still in its ungreased pan, hung over a bottle neck or on the pan's feet. Cooling right side up compresses the crumb into a dense band at the bottom.
- YieldThe angel cake fills a 10-inch tube pan and serves 10 to 12. Each sponge cake gives one 8- or 9-inch layer pan or a small loaf, serving 6 to 8.
Fireless cookers were a serious domestic technology in the first quarter of the twentieth century: an insulated box, usually packed with mineral wool or ground cork, in which soapstone or iron discs heated on the range carried food through hours of cooking with no further fuel. They were sold as a saving in coal, in kitchen heat and in the cook's attention, and manufacturers pressed hard to prove the cookers could bake as well as stew -- hence a cake chapter in a fireless section, since a light sponge is the hardest thing to ask of falling, unregulated heat. Angel cake itself is an American invention generally traced to the last decades of the nineteenth century, and its spread is usually tied to the arrival of the rotary egg beater and of finely milled white flour; before both, beating ten whites stiff enough by fork or whisk was work few households would undertake for a single cake.