Angel Cake
1 teaspoon cream of tartar 1 cup sugar 3/4 cup flour ¾ teaspoon salt ¼ teaspoon vanilla Beat whites of eggs until frothy; add cream of tartar, and continue beating until eggs are stiff; then add sugar gradually. Fold in flour mixed with salt and sifted four times, and add vanilla. Bake forty-five to fifty minutes in an unbuttered angel-cake pan. After cake has risen and begins to brown, cover with a buttered paper.
A classic foam cake with no fat and no chemical leavening -- every bit of rise comes from air beaten into the whites and steam. The original gives no oven temperature, which is the one number a modern cook needs.
- Oven heatThe original gives no temperature. For a cake of this type a moderate oven, about 325F/165C, is the usual modern setting; anything hotter sets the crust before the interior has expanded and the centre falls.
- The panAn unbuttered tube pan is not an oversight. The batter must grip the sides to climb; grease of any kind, including residual fat on the beaters or in the bowl, will keep it flat. Use metal, never nonstick or silicone.
- Egg whitesTen whites is roughly 1 1/4 cups, about 300 ml. Bring them to room temperature before beating and check each one for stray yolk, which behaves like grease.
- Beat to soft, not dry"Stiff" here means the peak just holds and folds over slightly at the tip. Beaten to a dry, granular foam the whites cannot stretch further in the oven and the crumb turns coarse.
- Sifting the flourFour siftings is not padding. With no fat to tenderise, aerating and lightening the flour is what keeps the crumb fine. Use plain cake flour or all-purpose sifted well; measure after sifting.
- The buttered paperLaid loosely on top once the cake has domed and coloured, it keeps the crust from setting hard while the middle finishes. Foil or parchment does the same job.
- CoolingInvert the pan immediately on its feet or over a bottle neck and leave until completely cold. A hot angel cake left upright collapses under its own weight.
- YieldOne tube cake; the quantities are modest for a full-size 10-inch pan, so expect a smaller cake and fewer servings. Serve plain, with fruit, or with a thin glaze -- the cake is too fragile for heavy frosting.
Angel cake -- angel food cake in most later American books -- appears in printed American collections from the 1870s and 1880s, by which time commercial cream of tartar and finely milled white flour were both cheaply available. The cream of tartar helps the whites hold their foam and keeps the baked crumb white rather than ivory. The name is traditionally explained as a contrast to the darker, richer butter-and-yolk cakes of the period, though this is folk explanation rather than documented fact. Beating ten whites stiff was hard work by hand, and the recipe suited the rotary egg beaters then coming into household use.