Angel Cake
11 eggs, 11/2 glasses sugar, 1 glass flour, 1 tsp. Slade's cream tartar, 1 tsp. vanilla or any flavoring. Use an ordinary drinking glass. Beat eggs until very stiff. Sift flour and sugar together four times, the last time add cream tartar. Sift all into eggs slowly and fold in with wooden spoon; do not beat. CATHERINE WAGNER.
A classic egg-white sponge with no fat and no chemical leavening, written for a cook who already knew what angel cake was. Two things are left unsaid: the eggs are whites only, and the pan must be ungreased.
- Eggs means whitesEleven eggs here means the whites of eleven eggs — roughly 1 1/3 to 1 1/2 cups. Nothing in an angel cake tolerates yolk; a trace of it will keep the whites from reaching full volume.
- The glassAn ordinary drinking glass is conventionally taken as about 8 fluid ounces, which would make this 1 1/2 cups sugar and 1 cup flour. On that reading the weights are roughly 10 1/2 oz sugar and 4 1/2 oz flour — a very light ratio, which is the point.
- Slade's cream tartarSlade's was a Boston spice and cream-of-tartar brand sold widely in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Any modern cream of tartar substitutes directly, teaspoon for teaspoon.
- Where the cream of tartar goesThe recipe sifts it in with the flour and sugar. Modern practice usually adds it to the whites during beating, on the reasoning that its job is to stabilize the foam as it is built rather than after. Either approach works here.
- Beat until very stiff, but not dryStop at firm, glossy peaks. Whites beaten past that point break into curds and the batter will not fold smoothly, which is exactly the failure the wooden spoon and "do not beat" are guarding against.
- FoldingSift the dry mixture over the whites in three or four additions, cutting down and lifting over each time. Deflating the foam is the only real way to ruin this cake, as there is no other leavening.
- Pan and ovenUse an ungreased 10-inch tube pan — the batter needs to grip the sides to climb. Bake at 325-350F for 40 to 50 minutes, until the top springs back and a skewer comes out clean.
- CoolingInvert the pan immediately and leave the cake hanging until completely cold, then loosen with a thin knife. Cooled right side up, a fat-free sponge collapses under its own weight.
- YieldOne 10-inch tube cake, 12 to 14 slices. Serve plain or with fruit; icing tends to overwhelm it.
Angel cake — angel food cake in most American sources — spread through community and church cookbooks in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, and by the time of books like this one versions of it were widely in circulation. Its rise is generally traced to two things: cheap, finely granulated sugar and the arrival of the rotary egg beater, which made whipping ten or twelve whites much less of an ordeal than by hand. The cake's extravagance is in labor and eggs rather than money, and its whiteness was part of the appeal in an era that prized pale, refined baking. The named brand of cream of tartar is a small period detail worth noticing: contributors to church and society cookbooks sometimes specified the grocer's brand they trusted, and such mentions have often been read as part of the neighborly tone of these books rather than as formal instruction.