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White Jelly Roll
The angel food cake does not answer to roll up, but nearly the same ingredients put together in another way make a fine roll and also white cake lining for charlotte-russe. 10 ounces of granulated sugar--a heaping cupful. 12 ounces of whites of eggs--13 whites. 6 ounces of flour--a heaping cupful. 2 rounded teaspoonfuls cream of tartar. Vanilla or lemon extract, Put the sugar and white of eggs into a deep pan, pail or brass kettle and beat them together with the wire egg whisk for about 20 minutes. If beaten rapidly in a cool place the mixture will then be like good cake frosting. Then add the cream of tartar and flavoring and beat one minute longer, next, stir in the flour with a spoon. It should be baked immediately. Lay a sheet of blank paper on the largest baking pan, spread the cake only just thick enough to hide the paper, bake about six or eight minutes. Brush the paper over with water to get it off. Spread lemon or orange honey or red jelly on the cake and roll up.
A meringue-based sheet cake, essentially angel food thinned out and baked flat so it will roll. Weigh everything: the book's cup equivalents come from a smaller nineteenth-century cup and do not match the ounces.
- Trust the weights, not the cups10 oz sugar is about 1 1/2 modern cups, and 6 oz flour about 1 1/2 cups of cake flour spooned and levelled. The book's "heaping cupful" figures do not match its own ounces; go by the scale.
- 12 ounces of whitesThat is roughly 1 1/2 cups, which today takes about 11 to 12 large eggs rather than 13. Use a scale; egg sizing has shifted since the book was written.
- Oven heatThe original names none. A sheet this thin wants a fairly quick oven so it sets before it dries; somewhere in the 375-425F range suits the stated six to eight minutes, with the cake barely coloured. This is inference, not the book's instruction.
- The 20 minutes of beatingThat is hand-whisking sugar and whites together to the stage the book calls "good cake frosting" - thick, glossy, holding a ribbon. A stand mixer will reach the same point in a fraction of the time, perhaps 8 to 10 minutes on medium-high. Cool room, cool bowl, as instructed.
- Cream of tartar goes in lateUnusual, but deliberate: the acid is here to stabilise an already-built foam and to keep the crumb white and tender, not to help it whip. Add it and the extract at the end, one minute more, then fold the flour in by hand with a spoon or spatula.
- Bake at onceThis is the hinge. There is no chemical leavening; the whites begin weeping as soon as the flour is in. Have the pan lined and the oven hot before you start beating.
- "Blank paper" and the water trickPlain unglazed paper, brushed with water so the damp releases it from the baked cake. Parchment does the same job with no brushing. Turn the sheet out, peel, spread the filling and roll while the cake is still warm and pliable — cooled, it cracks.
- Yield and the charlotte-russe useThe book specifies only "the largest baking pan," and spread just thick enough to hide the paper the batter covers a wide sheet, giving one roll. Baked in the same thin sheet and cut into strips or fingers, it is the white lining the author mentions for a charlotte russe mould.
Jelly roll is the American name for what Britain calls a Swiss roll, and it turns up in late nineteenth-century pastry manuals as a way of using up the mountain of egg whites that a professional kitchen generated while making custards, ice creams and gold cakes with the yolks. Angel food cake, which this recipe is openly derived from, was well established in the United States by then hat angel food itself is too fragile to roll, but that the same materials, handled differently, will bend. The nod to charlotte russe suggests a kitchen in which a sheet of white sponge was standard stock for lining moulds, whether domestic or professional. The quantities arrive in ounces first and a brass kettle is offered as a mixing vessel, the marks of a book written for cooking in volume.