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Angel Cake
This is a sure and perfect recipe for angel cake: One and a fourth cupfuls granulated sugar, sifted only once, then measured; one and one-quarter cupfuls whites of eggs, measured before beating; one cupful of flour, level full after it has been sifted five times; beat the eggs stiff; when half beaten add one-half teaspoonful cream tartar and finish beating; a speck of salt, sift in sugar very gently (folding it, not beat) then flour the same way, and last, flavor to taste. Touch very lightly when mixing and bake in an ungreased pan in a moderate oven, increasing the heat. Whites of ten large eggs or eleven small ones.
A late-19th-century angel food cake, written for a cook who already knew how to fold. The proportions are sound; only the oven instruction and the flour need translating.
- The hinge: fold, do not stirThe whipped whites are the only leavening — there is no baking powder. Sift the sugar and then the flour over the surface in three or four additions and cut down and over with a spatula until just no streaks remain. Once the foam deflates nothing will bring it back.
- Egg white measureOne and a quarter cupfuls of unbeaten whites is about 10 fl oz (300 ml); the recipe puts this at ten large eggs or eleven small ones. Measuring by volume rather than count is the more reliable instruction; separate the eggs cold, then let the whites stand until room temperature before beating.
- Flour sifted five timesRepeated sifting was a way of getting aerated, lump-free flour from the softer, less finely milled flour of the period. Modern cake flour sifted two or three times should give much the same result. Do not substitute bread flour; all-purpose works but the crumb is tougher.
- "Moderate oven, increasing the heat"'Moderate' in period usage is generally reckoned at somewhere around 325-350F. The instruction to raise the heat may reflect a range that had to be fed as it burned down, though the recipe does not say so; in a modern oven, bake steadily at 325F and begin testing at about 40 minutes, until the top springs back and a skewer comes out clean.
- Cream of tartar at the halfway pointAdding it when the whites are half beaten, not at the start, is deliberate — it stabilizes the foam once it has body and keeps it from going grainy and dry. Half a teaspoon for ten whites is on the modest side but adequate.
- The ungreased panUse a two-piece aluminum tube pan, never nonstick and never greased. The batter must grip the sides to climb. Invert the pan the moment it leaves the oven and leave it upside down until fully cold, or the cake compresses under its own weight.
- "Flavor to taste"A teaspoon of vanilla, or half vanilla and half almond extract, suits the cake; both were common flavourings for angel cakes of the period. Add it after the flour, with the same light hand, and keep it to a teaspoon or so — liquid slackens the foam.
- Yield and servingWith only one cupful of flour this is a modest angel cake — a 9- or 10-inch tube pan, giving roughly a dozen slices. Cut with a serrated knife or pull apart with two forks; a straight blade compresses the crumb. Good plain, with fruit, or with whipped cream.
Angel cake — angel food cake in most later American cookbooks — belongs to the last third of the nineteenth century, and it is usually associated with the spread of finely milled white flour, cheap granulated sugar, and the tube pan whose central column let heat reach the middle of a very wet, very airy batter. Its extravagance was in the eggs: a cake that used ten or eleven whites and no yolks presumed a household with either a good egg supply or a plan for the yolks, often a custard or a gold cake, which is why the two recipes so often sit near each other. The name is generally taken to describe the whiteness and lightness rather than any particular occasion, and devil's food — dark, rich, chocolate — is commonly said to have been named as its opposite, though that is tradition rather than documented fact. The confident opening claim of a "sure and perfect recipe" reflects how easily such cakes failed on an uneven range.