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Angel's Food
Use the whites of eleven eggs, one and a half tumbler of sifted granulated sugar, one tumbler sifted flour, one tea-spoon of vanilla, one tea-spoon of cream tartar; sift the flour four times, then add the cream tartar and sift again-but measure it before putting in the cream of tartar-sift the sugar and measure it; beat the eggs to a stiff froth on a large platter; on the same platter add the sugar lightly, then the flour very gently, then the vanilla; do not stop beating until you put it in the pan to bake. Bake forty minutes in a moderate oven, try with a straw and if too soft let it remain a few minutes longer. Do not open the oven until the cake has been in fifteen minutes. Turn the pan upside down to cool, and when cold, take out by loosening around the sides with a knife, and then ice; use a pan that has never been greased. The tumbler for measuring must hold two and one-fourth gills. The pans have feet. ICING. -Whites of two eggs, two tea-cups granulated sugar; boil the sugar until clear with just enough water to moisten it. Having beaten the eggs to a stiff froth, pour boiling syrup very slowly over them. Dissolve one-half tea-spoon of citric acid in a small table-spoon of water, and put enough in to make a pleasant tart-add a little essence of lemon.
An early angel food cake, from the years when the tube pan with feet was a new piece of equipment. The measures are given in tumblers, but the book helpfully defines the tumbler for us.
- The tumblerStated as 2 1/4 gills, which is about 9 fluid ounces or a generous cup. So the sugar is roughly 1 2/3 cups sifted granulated and the flour about 1 cup plus 2 tablespoons sifted, measured before the cream of tartar goes in.
- Eleven egg whitesAbout 1 1/3 cups of whites from modern large eggs. Separate them cold, then let them stand until they lose their chill; they whip higher at room temperature, and a speck of yolk or fat will keep them from rising at all.
- Moderate oven350F. Some modern practice favours 325F for a tall tube cake, which gives a more even crumb over the 40 minutes called for. The instruction not to open the door for the first fifteen minutes still holds, since the foam has no structure beyond the set egg protein.
- FlourSifting four times is not decoration. Flour of the period varied more than ours and packed down in storage; the repeated sifting aerates it and breaks lumps so it can be folded in without deflating the whites. With modern cake flour, two or three siftings does much the same work.
- The hinge"Do not stop beating until you put it in the pan" is the one line to disregard in part. Beat the whites to a stiff froth, then fold the sugar and flour in with a light hand; continued hard beating after the flour is added knocks the air out and the cake bakes dense.
- Ungreased pan with feetThe batter must grip the sides to climb, so the pan is never greased or lined. The feet let you invert the pan immediately so the cake hangs while it sets; if your tube pan has no feet, balance the centre tube over a bottle neck.
- TestingA straw from a broom was the period skewer. Use a thin bamboo skewer, or press the top lightly with a fingertip and look for it to spring back.
- The icingThis is a boiled-sugar meringue. "Boil until clear" gives no temperature; standard practice for an icing of this kind is to take the syrup to about 240F on a thermometer, then pour it in a thin thread down the side of the bowl while beating. Citric acid is sold as sour salt; half a teaspoon in a tablespoon of water is enough to sharpen two cups of sugar.
- YieldOne 10-inch tube cake, twelve to sixteen slices. Cut it with a serrated knife or pull it apart with two forks; a straight blade compresses the crumb.
Angel food cake appears in American cookbooks in the last quarter of the nineteenth century and depended on two things becoming ordinary in the kitchen: the geared rotary egg beater, which made a stiff froth from eleven whites a matter of minutes rather than a long arm-aching job with a whisk or a bundle of twigs, and cheap chemically refined cream of tartar to stabilise the foam. The detail that gives the period away is the aside at the end — "the pans have feet" — a note explaining a piece of equipment the reader may not yet own, since the tall ungreased tube pan was then a specialised purchase. Its counterpart, devil's food, dark with chocolate, came later, and the name is often said to have been chosen in deliberate contrast. Recipes of this kind are also often traced to Southern and Pennsylvania German households with a surplus of whites left from custards and noodles, a claim that is traditional rather than documented; what is certain is that a cake using eleven whites and no yolks, butter or milk assumes a cook who has somewhere else to put the rest of the egg.