Angel Food Cake (1931)

Three cakes told apart by their eggs

Chatfield sets angel food in a small table beside sponge cake and sunshine cake, and the flour is the same for all three, a single cup. The defining distinction is the egg mixture. Sponge cake takes four or five whole eggs, sunshine cake six whites and three yolks, and angel food a cup of whites alone, which the table reckons at eight fairly large ones.

Sugar is the one open line for angel food, anywhere from one to one and a half cups. This version takes one and a quarter, the middle of that range and in step with the ratio of sugar to whites in current recipes. The bulletin also asks for fine, soft-wheat flour, which today means cake flour.

Why stirring is off the table

Because the foam is the leavening, anything that knocks air out of it costs the cake height. Only the folding motion should be used, Chatfield warns, "for stirring tends to release the air depended on for leavening." Even the flavoring waits until the mixture is partly blended, so the batter is never worked a second time just to carry the vanilla. For beating, she preferred a dover beater to a wire whisk because it saved time and energy, a job an electric mixer does now.

Fewer eggs, and eight spare yolks

The bulletin offers a thriftier route. It allows one or two of the eggs in the table to be replaced with two tablespoons of milk or water and half a teaspoon of baking powder for each egg left out, with the cake baked a little hotter, at about 340°F. Elsewhere it admits that cutting eggs makes a cheaper cake but a less desirable one. This version keeps every white.

It also has a use for the yolks left after separating the eggs. Chatfield notes that cooks can use whites or yolks in fancy white or yellow cakes, partly as an economy with eggs left over, counting two yolks roughly as one egg.

A slow oven and one whole batch

The oven figure is the bulletin's slow setting for sponge cakes, 325°F, with about an hour for a fairly large angel food. Its table quantities, though, were meant to make two medium-sized loaves. Baked as a single 10-inch tube cake, the whole batch is larger than either of those loaves and smaller than today's twelve-white cakes, which take 45 to 60 minutes at the same heat.

Modern wheat-flour recipes built on eight or nine whites in a 10-inch pan offer a useful comparison. Anna Olson's eight-white cake bakes at 325°F for 30 to 35 minutes. For our single tube cake, we use 35 to 45 minutes as a planning range and let the golden, springy top decide. Our guide to slow, moderate and hot ovens traces what the period oven terms meant in degrees.

Upside down for a reason

Chatfield wants a smooth, ungreased pan, and a tube pan because its center opening lets the mixture heat evenly. Her cooling rule follows from how fragile the cake is: fresh from the oven it is too soft and hot to handle, so the pan goes upside down until the cake firms, and the cake comes out before it reaches room temperature and starts to sweat.