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Three-Egg Angel Cake
1 cup sugar 1 1/3 cups flour 1/2 teaspoon cream of tartar 3 teaspoons Royal Baking Powder 1/3 teaspoon salt 2/3 cup scalded milk 1 teaspoon almond or vanilla extract whites of 3 eggs METHOD I Mix and sift first five ingredients four times. Add milk very slowly, while still hot, beating continually; add vanilla; mix well and fold in whites of eggs beaten until light. 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. Cover top and sides with either white or chocolate icing. METHOD II Boil sugar with cold milk until thick and pour very slowly over whites of eggs which have been beaten light with a wire whip. Fold in flour, cream of tartar, salt and baking powder which have been sifted together four or five times. With whip beat mixture with long strokes until very light; add flavoring; put into ungreased angel cake tin in cold oven, turn on heat and bake at very low temperature for 25 minutes. Raise temperature slightly and bake 30 minutes longer or until thoroughly baked. Remove from oven, invert pan and allow to stand until cold. Cover the top and sides with either white or chocolate icing.
This is a baking-powder "angel cake" — an economy version using three egg whites and milk rather than the dozen whites of a true angel food. Both methods work, but they behave very differently, and the temperature language needs translating.
- "Very slow oven"Period ranges for this term run around 250-275F, so treat it as the bottom of a modern oven's range. For Method II, "very low temperature" for the first 25 minutes is the same range; "raise temperature slightly" is not quantified in the original, so nudge it up modestly rather than to any fixed figure. The cake is done when the top springs back and a skewer comes out clean.
- Cold-oven startMethod II deliberately begins in a cold oven, which lets the batter expand as the heat climbs. This only works in an oven that heats gradually; a modern fan oven that hits temperature in minutes defeats the purpose. Turn the fan off, or use Method I with a preheated oven.
- Sifting four times is not paddingThere is no creamed fat here, so lift comes from the beaten whites and the baking powder, with the repeated sifting distributing the powder evenly and lightening the dry mix. Skipping it is likely to give a denser, less even crumb.
- Scalded milk, added hotScalding means heating to just below the boil, about 180F, until bubbles form at the edge. It must go in slowly with constant beating or the flour will set into lumps. The hot milk goes into the dry mix rather than into eggs alone, which puts Method I closer in handling to a hot-milk sponge than to a true angel food.
- Method II's syrup"Boil sugar with cold milk until thick" is unmeasured; take it to the thread stage, about 230F, then pour it in a thin stream onto the beaten whites. Poured too fast or too hot it will scramble the whites and deflate them.
- Ungreased tin, inverted to coolThe batter needs to grip the sides to climb, so use a plain aluminium tube pan — never nonstick, and never greased. Inverting the pan while it cools keeps the crumb from collapsing under its own weight.
- Almond extractIf choosing almond, taste-judge it and consider a scant teaspoon; almond flavouring is easy to overdo.
- YieldThe original does not give a tin size; this is a modest batter, so a smaller tube tin suits it better than a large one. Being fat-free it will stale quickly, so eat it within a day or two.
This recipe comes from the kind of promotional cookbook published by baking powder manufacturers, who turned out branded booklets in enormous numbers from the late nineteenth century onward — the point of every page was to demonstrate that a tin of the sponsoring brand could stand in for older, fussier methods. True angel food cake, which appears in American cookbooks from the 1870s and 1880s, is leavened only by a dozen or more egg whites beaten to a foam and stabilised with cream of tartar. Calling a three-egg, milk-and-baking-powder batter an "angel cake" is a piece of commercial optimism, but it addressed a genuine household problem: eggs were expensive and seasonal, and a recipe demanding eleven whites left the cook with eleven yolks to use up. The two methods given here reflect competing sponge techniques of the period — the hot-milk sponge, in which scalded milk is beaten into the dry mix, and the boiled-syrup meringue borrowed from confectionery.