My 92yo grandma once said to me, “If your Angel cake doesn’t fly out of the pan on its own, rip it up into a trifle and carry it to church because it obviously needs a little more prayin’ over.” Lol
Ha! Or, similar, as per my Gramma and Mom, if your Angel Food Cake falls in the middle, fill the hole with whipped cream, chill it till firmed up a bit, slice it, and uh pretend you meant to do that.
Several years ago, I was the main cook for a medieval feast, where I served approximately 100 people multiple courses throughout the evening. The final dessert that I served was toasted angel food cake, layered with whipped marscapone cheese and topped with a warm fruit compote of preserved pears and figs. It was the most decadent and delicious thing I have ever put into my mouth, and the exclamations of joy from the dining area still make me smile to this day. That said, just a plain slice of angel food cake with strawberries and whipped cream is always a winner, as well.
@@CynnaAel For the starters, I had home cooked bread with two butters, honey and lemon, and a home made herbed soft cheese for the High Table, along with stuffed mushroom caps, frozen sugared grapes, and a green sallat with herb vinegrette. Second course was a mixed meat pie (beef, chicken, dates, assorted spices), with two veggies and a starch. I'm sorry, I can't remember what those were right now. Palate cleanser was Rose and Violet flavored ices (sorbets, basically). Third course was a whole slow baked chicken (per table, so about 25 chickens), flavored with garlic and rosemary, with another two veggies and a starch. The meal was capped off with the toasted angel food cake.
There were six kids in our family and everyone's birthday was celebrated with a Fanny Farmer cake . We used to take turns with the crank mixer. My mom alwasy told us we had to remain absolutely quiet while it was in the oven or we'd ruin the cake. Likely some of the only peace and quiet she got with 6 kids running around.
My mom said the same thing! Don't slam the door, don't peek in the oven. Useful tips to be sure, for a souffle, but I'm not buying that for a box mix. 😂
When I was a teen, There were always random ingredients in the house. Id just get bored and make something. And most of those recipes were from Fannies Cookbook. I Love how detailed it is, there is an index for measurements, you are never confused about the next step, and it even has substitutions when they are applicable. The woman literally taught me how to cook almost a hundred years after she died. When the internet was a little less mature, her cookbook was still largely better than anything else you could buy, or find online, Id say until like 2010 ish. Thats a hell of an educational book if you are the go to for 100 years.
The reason she adds it at the end, is that if you add it early, the eggs take a lot longer to take stiff peaks. With modern tech, that isn't an issue, but if you are hand beating it, it makes a huge difference. (I did some meringues by hand, and found this out the hard way).
Pro Tip: Find a glass soda bottle and clean it thoroughly. When your angel food cake comes out of the oven, the hole in the middle of the pan should be able to slip over the top of the soda bottle and suspend the cake farther above the counter / table, allowing it to cool a little faster and helping to prevent condensation on the cake's top. I learned that from a baker who has won multiple awards for her angel food cake...my mom.
My angel cake pan, like the one Max uses in this video, has three little feet on the upper rim. After baking the pan can be flipped over and set on the counter. The feet keep it off the counter but more securely than a soda bottle.
On the subject of kitchen cleanliness I'm here to give a shout out to Ignaz Phillip Semmelweis who precedes Lister. In his time at Vienna hospital, student doctors would come from dissecting cadavers as part of their studies to the maternity ward to deliver babies. Semmelweis lowered the hospital's death rate from puerperal fever (by about 82%) simply by having his fellow doctors wash their hands with chlorinated lime solution. He was ridiculed by his peers, had a nervous breakdown and died incarcerated in a mental assylum. In 1971 the BBC broadcast a Radio 4 play, based on Morton Thompson's 1949 novel about Semmelweis, The Cry and the Covenant. It moved me to tears.
My italian aunt once left her husband in charge of making pasta. He asked how much flour, and she mentioned to him in dialect, something that roughly equates to a big handful. When they ended up with a metric ton of pasta, she called him out, that she only told him a handful. And he said "that's what i added!" and then they realized. he has large man hands. His handful was way bigger than hers.
I have a similar problem. Traditionally, my family (and most Viet people, I think) measure water for our rice using our fingers, ignoring the marks on the inside of the rice cooker. My rice varied wildly - one day dry, the other soggy - because I am tremendously bad at measuring things by eye and my fingers are short and stubby. I eventually worked out a ratio using the rice measuring cup and now have consistent rice. =))))))
Things I never would have guessed in a million years but now my life is now infinitely better for knowing; Max does an EXCELLENT Dr. Evil impersonation 😂
If you butter the pan, the cake won't rise. In another application of this principle, in the early 1900's my great grandmother, as was common custom for the place and time, would send one of the children to the local tavern with a bucket to fetch papa's Sunday beer. The tavern-keeper was known to pour so as to fill the bucket with a great deal of foam, and young 'uns didn't always know the difference. Great grandmother said not peep one to the tavern-keeper, she simply took a tiny bit of butter and laid a nearly imperceptible band of it inside the bucket just below the rim. The foam had nothing to cling to and the tavern-keeper had no option but to completely fill the bucket with beer.
Ok, I've been thinking about this for a while, but after this video I REALLY need to tell you about Petrona C. de Gandulfo, popularly known in Argentina and Latin America simply as "Doña Petrona". She wrote a huge, very comprehensive and very successful cookbook, first published in 1933 and still in printing with well over a hundred editions to date. Her book was too a very common gift to newly wed women and was passed from generation to generation of home cooks. I have a copy at home from 1974 which belonged to my boyfriend's great-aunt. Later, in 1952, she became a TV cook, and later had her own show which was also very successful and everybody remembers. She's been called the Argentinean Julia Child, although she started a couple of decades before Julia... she actually was kind of a late Fannie and an early Julia. You got to get to know her.
Doña Petrona was THE cook bible not only for her generation but to many generation that came after her. Now in 2023, there are more than 123 editions of her book with more than 3 millions books sold worldwide.
I learned to cook from Fannie Farmer! (The Marion Cunningham updated version from the 80s but still) I also have a bunch of the early editions and she's always very solid. Not the most adventurous recipes, but if it's in there, it WORKS. Always happy to see my gal getting the love she deserves. :)
My husband and I were given a Fannie Farmer as a wedding present in 1985. We haven’t cracked it open much since the advent of the internet, but it occupies a warm spot in my heart.
I have a copy from the 1940', and one from the 80's. I actually like the older version better. The more modern one left out several of my favorite recipes.
@@sianifairy9070 - HOW do you do that? I love angel food cake, but my GI doc put me on a FODMAP diet which means no grains like wheat, barley, or a few others that contain gluten (gluten is not the problem, that's a protein - a carbohydrate that comes along with gluteny grains is the problem). I hate the sandy-grainy texture of so many gluten-free baked goods.
@@MossyMozart With these meringue-based, airy baked goods you basically don’t want to develop any gluten so you can use gluten-free flour no problem, it won’t change the texture much!
@@MossyMozart when I make gluten free stuff I usually use a cup-for-cup flour (king arthur has a pretty good one, and the wegmans store brand isn't bad either), the texture isn't gritty but cookies and stuff tend to be crumblier-- check the ingredients for what mix of grains they're using though just to be sure
I grew up on a working cotton farm (about 65 years+ ago) no running water or electricity. Being sickly didn't matter I still had to work so I worked in the kitchen with Grandma who taught me so much. Nothing was measured ever. Biscuits were made with handfuls of flour and pinches of this & that! Always perfect! Guess when you cook so often for so many it just becomes easy. Great food because everything was grown on the farm never went to a store. There's one phrase you never heard on the farm "I'm bored!"
That's a phrase I also learned to keep to myself- "I'm bored", because my mum or another relative would FIND something for me to do, and it was rarely something fun. Helping in the kitchen and garden (one of the few chores I enjoyed), sorting socks, you name it. When I used to get fussy in church as a little kid, mum handed me a baby wipe and told me to make myself useful and wipe down the pews to save the preacher and ushers work later. So I'd hobble around, leg braces and walker frame click-clacking as I went from pew to pew, wiping at the armrests and whatever bits I could reach without bothering anyone or toppling over. The church is long gone, and I'm not a kid anymore, but I still try and help in the kitchen and garden when my health allows it. Not as often as I'd like right now, but seeing my folks enjoy my cooking is its own sort of medicine.
OMG I LOVE FANNIE FARMER. I have been using her banana bread recipe since I was 8. Still have it memorized. I can't believe one of my cooking heroes featured another of my cooking heroes and IM DYING.
When I was a teenager, my Mother started working full-time. One day, she tossed me a copy of the "Fannie Farmer Cooking School Cook Book". This was the best thing that a new cook could ask for. Half the book was dedicated to how to cook. The lay out of the recipes spoiled me for others.
My Mom's wedding gift from her mother was "The Mystery Chef's Own Cookbook". Sort of the idiot's guide to cooking. Told you everything, right down to what to buy for a meal and when and how to prep and cook everything. I still make the cinnamon bun recipe.
Mine was Betty Crocker's Big Red Cookbook. I loved it so much, I gifted a copy to a friend when she mentioned she and her husband were learning to cook so they'd stop eating takeout so much. My copy has long since been lost to a fire, unfortunately.
@@Zuraneve My mom still has that. I snatched one of the books of her Crocker 1986 binder sets that has all the sweets recipes in it though lol. She never cooks out of that set and prefers the older book.
Yes, the Betty Crocker red binder! I picked up one at a garage sale just after high school, and even though I knew how to cook from three semesters of home economics cooking classes in school, I learned more about baking from it. I'm much more of a baker than a cook.
That probably is the start of dietary modern science. Sure, militaries knew what to feed their men for millennia, going back 4,000 years, but amount wise it wasn’t really known.
I'd actually say she turned cooking into a painting by numbers kind of thing - you had the lines drawn out and colors clearly defined so 100 ppl could cook the same recipe and as long as they didn't freestyle all 100 would turn out the same. And if you just got access to a real oven and such after your family's ancestors cooked in a big iron pot on an open fire by throwing in whatever they had as poor ppl while 90% of their diet consisted of cheap bread before that is a huge step. And face it most workers in the 19th century lived off of whatever veggies they got, lots of bread and very rarely a properly cooked meal because most didn't have anything resembling a kitchen. In the countryside things were a bit better, but those ppl had no idea what to do with, oh, chili or nutmeg for example.
Yartzeit candles are incredibly standardized as only a couple companies make them, and they have to last for pretty much exactly 24 hours. If you get the ones in glass jars, they're endlessly reusable as juice glasses, stem vases, etc. My mother and grandmother kept them as glassware, and I do to! It doesn't surprise me at all that they'd be a standard measuring tool.
Filled to the brim, I get exactly 4 fluid ounces of water into a flat bottomed yahrzeit candle glass, but the kind with the stepped bottom hold exactly 5 ounces. ymmv.
@@aryahavinfun5682 That's not too bad considering that the general variability between different made for purpose measuring cups can also be pretty big.
I've started turning captions on during my rewatches of Max's vids after somebody flagged the fact that Jose's sense of humour was sometimes reflected in them, and gotta say I think the big *monch* at the end here when Max starts hand-stuffing cake in is a lovely extra giggle to round out the episode! 😂 Really, really impressed by the work the guys put in to make sure accurate CC's are uploaded to Tasting History vids. That's a remarkably rare thing, and in my experience has tended to be the hallmark of a really superlatively good creator/creator team?
IIRC, it was the basis for the home economics classes your high school may have had. The idea was partly to bring housewives into the modern era by teaching them more scientific approaches.
It's about this point that I realise my Tuesday late afternoons aren't complete without some food history. (I'm UK based). It's a very nice realisation.
The timeliness of this episode is kismet! I'm making a trifle tomorrow, and I wanted angel food cake, but I haven't a recipe for it. I resigned myself to pound cake, but then VOILA! you posted this! Thank you, thank you, thank you. The lemon mousse is done, and the berries are all prepped, I just needed the cake! And now I have a recipe to follow. Thanks, Max.
One just doesn't eat angel food cake without a fruit glaze of some sort; it's like the cake demands it. Hats off to Fannie Farmer for the great strides she made in the women's rights movement, even though that isn't what she was aiming for. Since her forté was cookery, the men basically disregarded her and thought of her skills as unimportant. She was able to institute changes, build businesses, and make in-roads into the male world without them even noticing. She set the table for Libbers who came after her (pun intended...forgive me lol).
You know, I have never understood why cookery is dismissed so quickly as unimportant. People need to eat. And I have had to teach enough of my bachelor friends how to cook that I know perfectly well how important it is as a basic life skill. Just another form of sexism I suppose, since it has long been considered as women's work. Surprising really, since a great many famous chefs are male.
@@girlunrepentant1254 yep. Anything necessary is branded both trivial and woman’s work. Even computer programming was viewed this way, I kid you not it was described in ways like “planning the day, with the shopping and the meal and picking the kids up” until it started gaining more and more male employment in which case it suddenly became “like planning a battle, or solving a complicated puzzle” and stuff like that.
@@kaitlyn__L The Original Programmers were Female! Rear Admiral Grace Hopper even coined the word "Bug" to describe a problem. The very first, Ada Lovelace, started it all generations before there were computers.
Never kept chickens but I've probably ate all the eggs with all the neighbors/family/friends that have kept chickens over the years. I always prefer them when eating just eggs. Home grown have a much better flavor. Prefer the store bought for baking though, I don't like when eggy flavor come through in cake.
as a Dutch person who grew up with recipes measuring in grams instead of volume, the American cup and table/teaspoon 'bake by volume' system was mindblowingly AWESOME!!! It's so much more intuitive, since I can easily 'guesstimate' how much a quarter cup of sugar is, but nobody, not even those who grew up with the measure-by-weight system, can handily guess how much a hundred grams of sugar is, or a hundred grams of flour, or a hundred grams of butter. Only professional cooks can do so. But even a child will understand how much something by volume is. Which is why Hannah Glasse's cookbook ('take butter the size of a walnut and as much thyme as will cover a sixpence') was such a huge success: no fancy measuring device needed, just common sense! Hurrah for the measuring cup!!
Volume works great and is probably better for a student or when on a budget. I find weight faster today but when I started cooking, 50 years ago, you needed a very costly scale (really a balance) that was also cumbersome so no one used it in a home. Today inexpensive, mass-produced load-cell/resistive-bridge based digital scales are available that instantly resolve a gram and take several kilos. Cooking by volume is still a valuable skill though.
I can usually tell by feel how many grams something is but I grew up cooking and it's something I practiced. It's a handy skill for winning things at summer fetes lol. Measuring by volume works well for breads and crumbles where it's a texture you're looking for and you can add more of an ingredient I've found but I hate it for cakes and will convert everything to grams because it's so easy for outside factors to mess with.
Idk why but I’m so invested in this channel. I love the content, but above that, I really just love seeing you do what you love! The growth this channel has amassed hay makes my heart sing.
I have a new appreciation for Max's dedication to the history education side of these old recipes. Ironically far better at it than the history channel
If this were produced by the History Channel, they'd be talking about how angels are actually aliens and the recipe is code for channeling a dimension door.
so this recipe is an old one. My grandparents are in their late 90s and my grandmother has collected cookbooks from years past, specifically a local farm town community of women here in Iowa. Every year since around the towns inceptions in 1856, women in the community put together a cookbook every year with recipe's from women in the community. everyone from my grandmother, great grandmother, great great grandmother have recipe's in this book every year. Well recently we found a large stockpile of these books going back to 1890 that my grandmother had been hoarding. So where am I going with this, well one of my favorite foods is angel cake that my grandmother has been making since I was young, she cannot cook anymore due to age and I decided to try some recipes' for it out of some of these books to find the one she uses. I found one that is almost identical to this one, however it comes with a homemade whip sort of egg frosting to go on the outside of this. Its a strange frosting but when you eat it, it makes your tongue tingle a bit... and its so damn good. Angel cake by itself is boring but this "frosting" makes it 12000x better! A lot of the recipe's in these books are also similar... a lot of dash of this, thimble of that...
I Love finding those old community cookbooks, I have a few from flea markets & such, one of my favorites has a joke recipe for elephant & rabbit stew, lol
My grandmother's recipes were basically "add enough of it until it looks good" lol I like to follow recipes, but I often play with them too to make them my own.
Fannie Farmer and Joy of Cooking were my bibles when I was learning to cook as a little girl. I still have both and plan to give copies to my son when he moves out on his own. Also, you need to try grilled angel food cake. Just lightly brown it on the grill and serve with an assortment of fruits and toppings. Delish!
Love the idea of giving a cook book as a wedding gift. My mom has a tradition where she gets a vintage copy of The New Antoinette Pope school cookbook and gives it to each new couple as a wedding gift. My grandma use to say it was the most important book in her home because “If you try cooking with the Bible you are gonna starve”. Grandma was awesome :)
@@RikuIshmaru Ouch. ^^ The receipe of my great-grandma turned out niecely, if not a TIIIIIIIIINY bit much. She started with "use 24 eggs". Big family back then ^^
I have a handwritten notebook with recipes my great grandma wrote. It has instructions such as 'the blue christmas cup full of flower and a small soup bowl full of milk' - those recipes use specific cups, pots and pans she owned. And she used to bake cake in a sawed off metal bucket because she didn't have a proper baking container for cake. There are a lot of magazine and newspaper cutouts with recipes in that notebook too, though.
@@Katharina-rp7iq I just cooked some rice and I always measure how much I need with that one coffee cup - some things never change. It does sound like a great treasure to have. Even if you don't have the cups she used.
I love that this was today's video. I made my first ever angel food cake today, and it was a chocolate one to boot! I wondered about the history of it a bit while making it, and watched this while spreading chocolate whipped cream on it. 😋 Incidentally, I made custard a few days ago and found my recipe while looking for something to do with so many egg whites...
If you still have some of your custard, I just saw a comment that it is excellent to make a French toast out of your angel food cake by dipping it in custard, frying it, and serve it with maple syrup and ice cream.
Ha. Having raised show chickens as a kid I'm amazed they marketed eggs by breed. I could never tell much difference (it's more what you feed them) - and having raised Turkish Sultans for show, I'm amazed they actually sold the eggs specifically (those are incredibly fancy ornamental show birds with feathered head-crests and feathered legs)
I can definitely tell the difference between our Marans and other bird eggs (larger, and somehow richer? Even though they have the same diet as our other girls). The bantam eggs are also nice, because they’re so small and rich, but I can see why someone would prefer Marans eggs versus other breeds!
In Colorado at the feed store they sold only the meat breeds cause it would get too cold for skinny egg layers chickens. I had a white Orpington and Barred Rock Chickens, strictly pets.
I never can tell the difference between my chickens eggs either. Duck eggs now, they are a very different texture. I have never had Maran chickens or eggs.
One of my favorite units of measurement is the "Gallup." It referred to molasses. When you turn up the jug to a steep pour you hear "Gallup" "Gallup..." A dozen gingerbread cookies calls for two gallups.
In honor of your big day, I’m going to make one of your favorite desserts, and eat it in front of you. And you can’t have any. Happy Birthday, Shelley! 🥳 🎂
@@sarahtaylor4264 I have an aunt who despises cake but she's heartbroken if no one bakesa cake because everyone else love it and she's hoping to be able to blow out the candles when she hits 70!
You are like "Answers with Joe" but with food.If you don't know him,it's a compliment :-) This may be the best RUclips channel for food in existence right now.Thank you for all your work and the genuine love you bring to this subject.Not regretting leaving the House of Mouse are ya?
The opening reminds me when my brother asked my mom for a recipe and later complained how the only number in the whole recipe was "1/2" in half and half
I love my family's Fannie Farmer cookbook - she learned to cook after recovering from illness, like me, and there is incredible practicality to the original versions (and some updates by her students) that makes them so easy for disabled users. A lot of it is just 'layer these ingredients in an oven dish, put them in a hot oven, let them stew for an hour or two with a bit of flour and stock, and you have a very nice hot meal with minimal effort.' The kind of cooking my French-trained father would never allow, but I rely on a lot as an adult.
Max, if I must say, you are the Ryan Reynolds of RUclips. You are presentable, all around lovable personality, you quote things you love and/or appreciate. And I'm sure I'm not the first to notice that you put little hints in your background 🤫 meaning your pokemon plushies and whatnot. I'm super psyched for your cookbook and I'll buy it as soon as it's available. Love your content man, keep up the good work buddy!
I am a professional baker and we weigh everything! It’s good to see that being taught to the public. Growing up, no one I knew ever weighed anything and I wasn’t taught to weigh either until I made it a career.
My mom was the same! I always begged her to write down her recipes for me but she said she couldn't because she never measured anything "just until it looks right" lol Now here I am trying to go by memory to make her recipes! So far only one down
My mother did too and the recipes I do of hers I measure with the palm of my hand. But her baking was atrocious because she didn't like doing it so I taught my self from a cookbook "madame Benoit encyclopedia of Canadian cooking" which was published in the 60s as a monthly supplement by the grocery store.
@@milyluv16 Same here. I finally just was able to make my mom’s tomato-based stuffed bell pepper mixture by eye and tasting as I went along a few nights ago (with a couple of slight alterations, as I like cheese and a bit of lemon juice in mine). I was quite pleased with myself haha. It took me quite a few rounds to get to this point.
I still have my mother's Fannie Farmer Cookbook which she got back in the 1940s when she became a wife and homemaker. She made the Fannie Farmer Angel Food Cake every year for my uncle's birthday starting back in the 1960s. He was one of the first people to have a special heart procedure and went on a very strict low fat, high fiber diet for the rest of his 95 years after suffering a major heart attack. And he loved my mom's lighter-than-air Angel Food Birthday Cake with macerated berries because my mom was a wonderful baker, as are you. She had that magic touch and loved to please her family with special cakes for each and every one's birthday. What a lovely tradition, which she passed along to me and my sister. We used to sing a song in grammar school, "Helping mother bake a cake you'd think was fun. It smells so good you can hardly wait till the baking's done." Thanks for reminding me of personal history as well as the great culinary history which you cover with such panache.
Clefable, my personal all time favorite . The original fairy 🧚♂️ pokemon, they would love angel cake since they also need to stay light to hop and dance around moon stones.
I've been using my mom's Fannie Farmer cookbook since I was a kid. It was GREAT to finally learn some history about her, making her more than just a name on a book!
She sold 360,000 copies of her cookbook in her lifetime. Even now that would be considered a pretty successful book. But lecturing at Harvard, starting your own culinary school? Yep, my hat is off to her.
We heard plenty about her when I went to culinary school for the Corps back in the 80s. She had a paper on upsizing recipes that may still be used today.
Fannie taught me everything I know about the basics of cooking and serving food! I grew up memorizing her recipes, with their crosshatched, step-by-step illustrations. And now I write cookbooks for a living.
Max, I watch a lot of content on RUclips. That moment when you were drizzling the coulis onto the cake, gently singing, followed by your calm exclaimations that it was going to be good? Not just unique, but heartwarming and enjoyable. I'm thankful that you can approach your channel with such apparent enjoyment and quiet enthusiasm. Keep it up, Max. You're doing wonderfully.
I learned to cook from my grandparents and the gift of a 1940's edition of Fannie Farmer. I still consider it my "kitchen bible" and have that same book, albeit stained, noted in and taped together.
I remember having one of those handheld beaters. We even had one of the really old fashioned ice cream makers. Angel food cake with whipped cream and berries as one of my favorite things
@@graceandglory1948 You can let little kids use those hand operated beater gadgets, but a bad idea to let them use electric mixers. I used those manual beaters for years, as a kid. They'll only work if you're turning them and won't go that fast unless you're really really cranking away furiously. And even so, you need to use both hands just to operate it so you can't get fingers caught in the beaters.
I'm so glad you plugged The Butchering Art! I read it last summer and just loved it. Bellevue by David Oshinsky is a really good read as well and in a similar vein.
My grandma's cookbook has a recipe that measures in "mustard cup". It was a little glass about 185ml and they don't make them anymore. We have one, but if it breaks we're doomed😂
My mother used to make this for my birthday every year. She put the cake pan onto a full coke bottle to hang it upside down. We always ate it with whipped cream or frosting.
My mom would make angel food cake for my birthday when I was young, too. I got to choose the color of cake and frosting. It was fun deciding on colors.
Fond memories of the Fanny Farmer cookbook! When my mother started to teach me how to cook - I was 7 - I was to read the recipe from Fanny Farmer. By recipe I mean the basics because I was sous cheffing for her (I had a title that I thought was neato). How to measure and weigh properly, beat egg whites, later how to cut vegetables into fine dice, regular dice, how to prepare artichokes and asparagus, etc. That version was from my grandmother who was a nurse and used the recipes for the sick copiously, as well as basic recipes. Once I had mastered the basics then I was allowed to graduate to the Gourmet Cookbooks. Her's were leather-bound with a silk ribbon you could use to bookmark your recipe. Very elegant. I still have all these to this day. With Angel Food Cake, her pan had the feet on them, however, she always filled an empty wine bottle with rice and set the pan upside down on the neck. She swore by this, saying that it circulated more air and kept the top from getting gummy. Thank you Max!
If your pan doesn’t have the legs you can put the pan on a bottle through the center hole so that the cake is suspended. That’s probably a better choice than resting the cake on a wire rack. The suspension of the cake is key to keeping all the air and volume in the cake.
Max, a chap called Ignaz Semmelweis predated Lister by about 15 years- research conducted in an anustrian maternity hospital in 1847 , but not published until 1851 or so. Fascinating story and well worth a read.
I've asked my Southern grandmother for some of her recipes and her measurements always call for "heaped" cups. But mostly it's because she's been cooking for 70 years and just works everything by eye until the consistency looks right to her.
Hey Max! I'm pretty sure you're not gonna read this by now, but in case you do, I just wanted to tell you that, after watching most episodes, it feels like you are an old friend. Watching them feels like meeting with an old friend after a good while. Please keep on doing your wonderful work. I send you a hug from the heart of South America!
People like Fannie Merritt Farmer are true heros of history, dedicating their whole life to improving people's lives with food. There is no goal in life more noble!
Love that you show the Parthian Chicken recipe when discussing "modern recipe format" - one of the truly ancient recipes you've shown on the channel! Keep up the great work, Max. Your channel is the best part of Tuesday.
I learned to cook using a later edition of her cookbook (post 1940 edition). The instructions are amazing and very detailed and possibly better than any modern cookbook I have used.
One of my favorite cakes. Angel food, Devil's food, carrot cake, and German chocolate. But the cake I would LOVE to see you do is pound cake. It has to have some fascinating history and stories.
Real pound cake is a pound each of flour, sugar, eggs, and butter. The eggs are seperated and beaten to provide the only leavening. Also a little nutmeg to cover the eggy taste. It keeps really well.
I have an angel food pan but never knew what the tabs on it were for. I didn't know you were supposed to flip it over and let the cake release itself. I love that I learned something new whenever I watch tasting history.
I love angle food cake! Reminds me of my grandmother. She’d always make them for everyone’s birthdays, and put fresh whipped cream on top, and a berry compote🥰 Yum!
Ignaz Philipp Semmelweis[ July 1818 - 13 August 1865) was the first pioneer of antiseptic procedures. Described as the "savior of mothers" before lister and pasteur
HA! Joseph Lister is my hubbys ancestor and he carries his last name! Which also means he is related to Anne Lister, what a rebel! Hubby is an old punk, go figure... We never knew about the book so thanks for that! I'm getting it pronto as I am a nurse and have a passion for medical history.
Hey, someone else who's read The Butchering Art! That book was a hell of a thing and makes you feel oh so glad Joseph Lister went through what he did to get people to wash their damn hands. ^^
Interesting to choose the example of Fannie Farmer explaining Capsicum, since, in a sense, she was wrong. Her Capsicum may have come from Africa, but the plant itself originates in South and Central America.
I like to make really thin layers of angel food cake in sheet pans, just cuz the best part is the caramelized edges that were in contact with the pan. Some warm rhubarb sauce and fresh whipped cream, yum!
My 92yo grandma once said to me, “If your Angel cake doesn’t fly out of the pan on its own, rip it up into a trifle and carry it to church because it obviously needs a little more prayin’ over.” Lol
Love it 😀
Lmao
Ha! Or, similar, as per my Gramma and Mom, if your Angel Food Cake falls in the middle, fill the hole with whipped cream, chill it till firmed up a bit, slice it, and uh pretend you meant to do that.
😁
I love it.
Several years ago, I was the main cook for a medieval feast, where I served approximately 100 people multiple courses throughout the evening. The final dessert that I served was toasted angel food cake, layered with whipped marscapone cheese and topped with a warm fruit compote of preserved pears and figs. It was the most decadent and delicious thing I have ever put into my mouth, and the exclamations of joy from the dining area still make me smile to this day.
That said, just a plain slice of angel food cake with strawberries and whipped cream is always a winner, as well.
Would you share recipes
I would love to know what your meal courses were. 💜💜💜
@@CynnaAel For the starters, I had home cooked bread with two butters, honey and lemon, and a home made herbed soft cheese for the High Table, along with stuffed mushroom caps, frozen sugared grapes, and a green sallat with herb vinegrette. Second course was a mixed meat pie (beef, chicken, dates, assorted spices), with two veggies and a starch. I'm sorry, I can't remember what those were right now. Palate cleanser was Rose and Violet flavored ices (sorbets, basically). Third course was a whole slow baked chicken (per table, so about 25 chickens), flavored with garlic and rosemary, with another two veggies and a starch. The meal was capped off with the toasted angel food cake.
Thank you for sharing!!!!
it's always cool to have imortal vampires in the comments sharing experiences from their youth
There were six kids in our family and everyone's birthday was celebrated with a Fanny Farmer cake . We used to take turns with the crank mixer. My mom alwasy told us we had to remain absolutely quiet while it was in the oven or we'd ruin the cake. Likely some of the only peace and quiet she got with 6 kids running around.
Your mom's a genius lol
I love it! Lol.
My grandmother told me that too! I still believe it...when there is a cake in the oven, BE QUIET or it will FALL FLAT! :)
My mom said the same thing! Don't slam the door, don't peek in the oven. Useful tips to be sure, for a souffle, but I'm not buying that for a box mix. 😂
Oh my goodness that's brilliant Haha. Thank you for sharing.
When I was a teen, There were always random ingredients in the house. Id just get bored and make something. And most of those recipes were from Fannies Cookbook. I Love how detailed it is, there is an index for measurements, you are never confused about the next step, and it even has substitutions when they are applicable. The woman literally taught me how to cook almost a hundred years after she died. When the internet was a little less mature, her cookbook was still largely better than anything else you could buy, or find online, Id say until like 2010 ish. Thats a hell of an educational book if you are the go to for 100 years.
"Add enough nutmeg..."
Townsends: You rang?
Beat me too it.
And that's enough nutmeg. *Carries on grating for another minute*
Enough nutmeg for Townsends makes me think of that Bender quote about cooking: "I only added 60% of the lethal dose!"
Dammit, I read it with Lurch's voice (the 60's sitcom version)
Alton Brown enters the conversation.
The reason she adds it at the end, is that if you add it early, the eggs take a lot longer to take stiff peaks. With modern tech, that isn't an issue, but if you are hand beating it, it makes a huge difference. (I did some meringues by hand, and found this out the hard way).
Thank you, that makes perfect sense. I remember hand cranking the old rotary beater - it sure grew muscles!
@@sadjaxx I did it with a fork. It was intense.
@@relativisticvelthat sounds like death ☠️
@@relativisticvel Are you some kind of masochist?
@@FreterP worse. Was by hand with a fork, not even a wisk. I was a poor college student at the time.
Pro Tip: Find a glass soda bottle and clean it thoroughly. When your angel food cake comes out of the oven, the hole in the middle of the pan should be able to slip over the top of the soda bottle and suspend the cake farther above the counter / table, allowing it to cool a little faster and helping to prevent condensation on the cake's top.
I learned that from a baker who has won multiple awards for her angel food cake...my mom.
That's how my mom always cooled the cake!
This is how we cooled angel food cake when I was growing up!
I tried that! It lasted about a minute and then fell over, throwing chunks of cake all over the floor 😆😭
Mine also fell over. It was after that incident that I invested in a pan with the feet for real.
My angel cake pan, like the one Max uses in this video, has three little feet on the upper rim. After baking the pan can be flipped over and set on the counter. The feet keep it off the counter but more securely than a soda bottle.
On the subject of kitchen cleanliness I'm here to give a shout out to Ignaz Phillip Semmelweis who precedes Lister. In his time at Vienna hospital, student doctors would come from dissecting cadavers as part of their studies to the maternity ward to deliver babies. Semmelweis lowered the hospital's death rate from puerperal fever (by about 82%) simply by having his fellow doctors wash their hands with chlorinated lime solution. He was ridiculed by his peers, had a nervous breakdown and died incarcerated in a mental assylum. In 1971 the BBC broadcast a Radio 4 play, based on Morton Thompson's 1949 novel about Semmelweis, The Cry and the Covenant. It moved me to tears.
My italian aunt once left her husband in charge of making pasta. He asked how much flour, and she mentioned to him in dialect, something that roughly equates to a big handful. When they ended up with a metric ton of pasta, she called him out, that she only told him a handful. And he said "that's what i added!" and then they realized. he has large man hands. His handful was way bigger than hers.
My parents have the same exact problem! 🤣
I have a similar problem. Traditionally, my family (and most Viet people, I think) measure water for our rice using our fingers, ignoring the marks on the inside of the rice cooker. My rice varied wildly - one day dry, the other soggy - because I am tremendously bad at measuring things by eye and my fingers are short and stubby. I eventually worked out a ratio using the rice measuring cup and now have consistent rice. =))))))
@@beeta137 who knew the best solution was to do it the correct way lol
My wife’s family has a “famous” (within their family, at least) recipe for a chocolate cake that calls for - very specifically - a 5¢ Hershey bar.
😂😂😂
what’s the recipe?
My family calls it Icebox Cake. It is awesome.
@@yata3826 I, as 1) a male, and 2) a non-blood relative, cannot obtain access to the recipe as long as my wife lives. Seriously.
That's because a Hershey bar cost a nickel from 1900-1969, when they got rid of it and made a bigger bar for a dime.
Things I never would have guessed in a million years but now my life is now infinitely better for knowing; Max does an EXCELLENT Dr. Evil impersonation 😂
The Julia Roberts impression wasn’t quite as good, but I’ll let it slide.
@@rootypoots 🤣
He just needed to do the pinkie thing.
Brooo on god, who is this man
Not entirely surprising. He's a real thespian.
If you butter the pan, the cake won't rise. In another application of this principle, in the early 1900's my great grandmother, as was common custom for the place and time, would send one of the children to the local tavern with a bucket to fetch papa's Sunday beer. The tavern-keeper was known to pour so as to fill the bucket with a great deal of foam, and young 'uns didn't always know the difference. Great grandmother said not peep one to the tavern-keeper, she simply took a tiny bit of butter and laid a nearly imperceptible band of it inside the bucket just below the rim. The foam had nothing to cling to and the tavern-keeper had no option but to completely fill the bucket with beer.
That's awesome. I love hearing or reading family stories lol like this. Thanks for sharing.
After eating an entire angel food cake I do not feel light enough to fly but it sure is delicious.
Yeah, then I add some cream cheese frosting and strawberries and the only things flying are the numbers on my scale…
I like to eat it with my bare hands
Keep trying!
@@sarahrosen4985 jello and cool whip mmmm
After that, even an angel would need to take a dump to rise back to heaven…
Ok, I've been thinking about this for a while, but after this video I REALLY need to tell you about Petrona C. de Gandulfo, popularly known in Argentina and Latin America simply as "Doña Petrona". She wrote a huge, very comprehensive and very successful cookbook, first published in 1933 and still in printing with well over a hundred editions to date. Her book was too a very common gift to newly wed women and was passed from generation to generation of home cooks. I have a copy at home from 1974 which belonged to my boyfriend's great-aunt. Later, in 1952, she became a TV cook, and later had her own show which was also very successful and everybody remembers. She's been called the Argentinean Julia Child, although she started a couple of decades before Julia... she actually was kind of a late Fannie and an early Julia. You got to get to know her.
Doña Petrona was THE cook bible not only for her generation but to many generation that came after her. Now in 2023, there are more than 123 editions of her book with more than 3 millions books sold worldwide.
I learned to cook from Fannie Farmer! (The Marion Cunningham updated version from the 80s but still) I also have a bunch of the early editions and she's always very solid. Not the most adventurous recipes, but if it's in there, it WORKS. Always happy to see my gal getting the love she deserves. :)
Same! I'm only 22 so I was surprised it is so old.
My husband and I were given a Fannie Farmer as a wedding present in 1985. We haven’t cracked it open much since the advent of the internet, but it occupies a warm spot in my heart.
I have a copy from the 1940', and one from the 80's. I actually like the older version better. The more modern one left out several of my favorite recipes.
@@sandralouth3103 same. I miss our old book
@@mirandamom1346 funny I still have my wedding present fanny farmer from 1985 just not the same husband... he couldn't remember he was married
My grandmother’s chocolate cake recipe calls for “butter the size of an egg”
Tbh it makes about as much sense as the brits meassuring in stones and feet
Egg size was standardized
It’s bout 2T
That "I was right!" is ripe for future cutaway shots like the hardtack ended up being 😂
Exactly what I was going to write.
I want a gif of that
Timestamp, please?
@@Amcsae 14:25 :)
Soon enough, the writer of this comment will be able to say "I was right!"
My favorite thing about angel food cake? The base recipe is non-dairy. Finally a cake that I'm not allergic to!
....and it's not so hard to make it gluten free too....and still tasting like proper angel food cake!
@@sianifairy9070 - HOW do you do that? I love angel food cake, but my GI doc put me on a FODMAP diet which means no grains like wheat, barley, or a few others that contain gluten (gluten is not the problem, that's a protein - a carbohydrate that comes along with gluteny grains is the problem). I hate the sandy-grainy texture of so many gluten-free baked goods.
@@MossyMozart With these meringue-based, airy baked goods you basically don’t want to develop any gluten so you can use gluten-free flour no problem, it won’t change the texture much!
@@MossyMozart when I make gluten free stuff I usually use a cup-for-cup flour (king arthur has a pretty good one, and the wegmans store brand isn't bad either), the texture isn't gritty but cookies and stuff tend to be crumblier-- check the ingredients for what mix of grains they're using though just to be sure
I love how max has a different Pokémon stuffie in the background of every video ❤️
i had to explain this to my mom, but now she enjoys looking at the Pokemon, really adds to the shows charm
They're always related to whatever he's making too
@@chasedbyvvolves9256 so ive been playing checkers while he has been playing chess.....
I can't wait to see his whole collection!
@@beepboop204 Your avatar
I grew up on a working cotton farm (about 65 years+ ago) no running water or electricity. Being sickly didn't matter I still had to work so I worked in the kitchen with Grandma who taught me so much. Nothing was measured ever. Biscuits were made with handfuls of flour and pinches of this & that! Always perfect! Guess when you cook so often for so many it just becomes easy. Great food because everything was grown on the farm never went to a store. There's one phrase you never heard on the farm "I'm bored!"
That's a phrase I also learned to keep to myself- "I'm bored", because my mum or another relative would FIND something for me to do, and it was rarely something fun. Helping in the kitchen and garden (one of the few chores I enjoyed), sorting socks, you name it. When I used to get fussy in church as a little kid, mum handed me a baby wipe and told me to make myself useful and wipe down the pews to save the preacher and ushers work later. So I'd hobble around, leg braces and walker frame click-clacking as I went from pew to pew, wiping at the armrests and whatever bits I could reach without bothering anyone or toppling over. The church is long gone, and I'm not a kid anymore, but I still try and help in the kitchen and garden when my health allows it. Not as often as I'd like right now, but seeing my folks enjoy my cooking is its own sort of medicine.
Them: “Do you prefer angel’s food cake or devil’s food cake?”
Me: “Yes.”
Them: “That wasn’t-“
Me: (already putting both on a plate)
Just grab both cakes and run. What is this sharing of cake? LOL
accurate
Me, too!!!
i just like cake.
Lady after my own heart. Yes, that's the way we should do it. Can I have some strawberries on my Angle food?
OMG I LOVE FANNIE FARMER. I have been using her banana bread recipe since I was 8. Still have it memorized. I can't believe one of my cooking heroes featured another of my cooking heroes and IM DYING.
When I was a teenager, my Mother started working full-time. One day, she tossed me a copy of the "Fannie Farmer Cooking School Cook Book". This was the best thing that a new cook could ask for. Half the book was dedicated to how to cook. The lay out of the recipes spoiled me for others.
My Mom's wedding gift from her mother was "The Mystery Chef's Own Cookbook". Sort of the idiot's guide to cooking. Told you everything, right down to what to buy for a meal and when and how to prep and cook everything. I still make the cinnamon bun recipe.
Mine is a 1963 Pillsbury's Family Cook Book, that the library was throwing out because it was stained. It tells you how to set a Russian service.
Mine was Betty Crocker's Big Red Cookbook. I loved it so much, I gifted a copy to a friend when she mentioned she and her husband were learning to cook so they'd stop eating takeout so much. My copy has long since been lost to a fire, unfortunately.
@@Zuraneve
My mom still has that. I snatched one of the books of her Crocker 1986 binder sets that has all the sweets recipes in it though lol. She never cooks out of that set and prefers the older book.
Yes, the Betty Crocker red binder! I picked up one at a garage sale just after high school, and even though I knew how to cook from three semesters of home economics cooking classes in school, I learned more about baking from it. I'm much more of a baker than a cook.
I've made this cake from scratch - when I was 10! Mom was scared to death - but it turned out awesome!
The argument could be made was that Escoffier made cookery an art form in the public’s eye, while Fanny Farmer made it a science.
That probably is the start of dietary modern science. Sure, militaries knew what to feed their men for millennia, going back 4,000 years, but amount wise it wasn’t really known.
I like the sound of that.
I'd actually say she turned cooking into a painting by numbers kind of thing - you had the lines drawn out and colors clearly defined so 100 ppl could cook the same recipe and as long as they didn't freestyle all 100 would turn out the same. And if you just got access to a real oven and such after your family's ancestors cooked in a big iron pot on an open fire by throwing in whatever they had as poor ppl while 90% of their diet consisted of cheap bread before that is a huge step. And face it most workers in the 19th century lived off of whatever veggies they got, lots of bread and very rarely a properly cooked meal because most didn't have anything resembling a kitchen. In the countryside things were a bit better, but those ppl had no idea what to do with, oh, chili or nutmeg for example.
@@Katharina-rp7iq the Rob Ross of cooking you could say :)
Baking, curing and fermenting are all chemistry; the rest is all art.
I'm thinking this cake would be incredible with Nostradamus's sour cherry jelly...
Yes , Because the tanginess of Nostradamus cherry jelly is gonna go well with this cake
Mmm yum!
@uleubner - Yes! Good memory. For those who don't remember, it's found in a "Tasting History" video.
Angel food cake dipped in custard and sautéed like French toast and served with ice cream and warm maple syrup is also very nice.
That...I want to try that.
That sounds amazing!
Yum!!!!
My hips gained a pound on each side just from reading that. Definitely trying it. :D
That sounds intriguing.... And gosh darn delicious!
We love a disabled woman finding success and going down in history for it
Yas we Stan
As a disabled woman who loves cooking I have a new idol.
Yuuus, I am so happy Max is giving her her due
she had a limp. Nothing more
No
Yartzeit candles are incredibly standardized as only a couple companies make them, and they have to last for pretty much exactly 24 hours. If you get the ones in glass jars, they're endlessly reusable as juice glasses, stem vases, etc. My mother and grandmother kept them as glassware, and I do to! It doesn't surprise me at all that they'd be a standard measuring tool.
I think I need some of these.
Somehow I didn't know that they were a standard measurement but I'm not surprised.
And probably about the right size for some Manichewitz.
Filled to the brim, I get exactly 4 fluid ounces of water into a flat bottomed yahrzeit candle glass, but the kind with the stepped bottom hold exactly 5 ounces. ymmv.
@@aryahavinfun5682 That's not too bad considering that the general variability between different made for purpose measuring cups can also be pretty big.
My mother-in-law measures things by the coffee cup and she uses particular ones that I think hold 6oz.
I've started turning captions on during my rewatches of Max's vids after somebody flagged the fact that Jose's sense of humour was sometimes reflected in them, and gotta say I think the big *monch* at the end here when Max starts hand-stuffing cake in is a lovely extra giggle to round out the episode! 😂
Really, really impressed by the work the guys put in to make sure accurate CC's are uploaded to Tasting History vids. That's a remarkably rare thing, and in my experience has tended to be the hallmark of a really superlatively good creator/creator team?
“Domestic science” sounds pretty cool, and it’s definitely accurate for some of the experiments that still go on in home kitchens.
Actually, some of what's going on in a modern kitchen is more akin to alchemy than science... 🤔
IIRC, it was the basis for the home economics classes your high school may have had. The idea was partly to bring housewives into the modern era by teaching them more scientific approaches.
They just changed the name to home economics
I reject a lot of hypotheses in my kitchen!
That "sure" at 11:25 is the single funniest thing I have heard all week
It's about this point that I realise my Tuesday late afternoons aren't complete without some food history. (I'm UK based). It's a very nice realisation.
A fellow UK based viewer :D
@@dustbargames6371 👋🏾 Good day!
A fellow UK viewer here too 👋
@@Lionstar16 👋🏾 Good day to you as well!
Italian, here. Almost the same time zone, same sensation of how better a Tuesday afternoon gets when Max's video are released 😀
The timeliness of this episode is kismet! I'm making a trifle tomorrow, and I wanted angel food cake, but I haven't a recipe for it. I resigned myself to pound cake, but then VOILA! you posted this! Thank you, thank you, thank you. The lemon mousse is done, and the berries are all prepped, I just needed the cake! And now I have a recipe to follow. Thanks, Max.
One just doesn't eat angel food cake without a fruit glaze of some sort; it's like the cake demands it. Hats off to Fannie Farmer for the great strides she made in the women's rights movement, even though that isn't what she was aiming for. Since her forté was cookery, the men basically disregarded her and thought of her skills as unimportant. She was able to institute changes, build businesses, and make in-roads into the male world without them even noticing. She set the table for Libbers who came after her (pun intended...forgive me lol).
You know, I have never understood why cookery is dismissed so quickly as unimportant. People need to eat. And I have had to teach enough of my bachelor friends how to cook that I know perfectly well how important it is as a basic life skill. Just another form of sexism I suppose, since it has long been considered as women's work. Surprising really, since a great many famous chefs are male.
@@girlunrepentant1254 yep. Anything necessary is branded both trivial and woman’s work. Even computer programming was viewed this way, I kid you not it was described in ways like “planning the day, with the shopping and the meal and picking the kids up” until it started gaining more and more male employment in which case it suddenly became “like planning a battle, or solving a complicated puzzle” and stuff like that.
@@girlunrepentant1254 Outside of the USA, most Chefs are male.
@@kaitlyn__L The Original Programmers were Female! Rear Admiral Grace Hopper even coined the word "Bug" to describe a problem. The very first, Ada Lovelace, started it all generations before there were computers.
@@Lurker1954 indeed! And trans women were involved in both x86 and ARM's development histories too!
Fun fact: Everyone of those chickens breeds still exists, and I have kept all of them.
Gotta catch 'em all
Never kept chickens but I've probably ate all the eggs with all the neighbors/family/friends that have kept chickens over the years.
I always prefer them when eating just eggs. Home grown have a much better flavor. Prefer the store bought for baking though, I don't like when eggy flavor come through in cake.
Buff Orpingtons are my favorite … they love to sit on your lap for scritchies.
Do the brahmin ones have two heads? 🤭
Evidence?
as a Dutch person who grew up with recipes measuring in grams instead of volume, the American cup and table/teaspoon 'bake by volume' system was mindblowingly AWESOME!!! It's so much more intuitive, since I can easily 'guesstimate' how much a quarter cup of sugar is, but nobody, not even those who grew up with the measure-by-weight system, can handily guess how much a hundred grams of sugar is, or a hundred grams of flour, or a hundred grams of butter. Only professional cooks can do so. But even a child will understand how much something by volume is. Which is why Hannah Glasse's cookbook ('take butter the size of a walnut and as much thyme as will cover a sixpence') was such a huge success: no fancy measuring device needed, just common sense! Hurrah for the measuring cup!!
Volume works great and is probably better for a student or when on a budget. I find weight faster today but when I started cooking, 50 years ago, you needed a very costly scale (really a balance) that was also cumbersome so no one used it in a home. Today inexpensive, mass-produced load-cell/resistive-bridge based digital scales are available that instantly resolve a gram and take several kilos. Cooking by volume is still a valuable skill though.
I can usually tell by feel how many grams something is but I grew up cooking and it's something I practiced. It's a handy skill for winning things at summer fetes lol. Measuring by volume works well for breads and crumbles where it's a texture you're looking for and you can add more of an ingredient I've found but I hate it for cakes and will convert everything to grams because it's so easy for outside factors to mess with.
Idk why but I’m so invested in this channel. I love the content, but above that, I really just love seeing you do what you love! The growth this channel has amassed hay makes my heart sing.
I have a new appreciation for Max's dedication to the history education side of these old recipes. Ironically far better at it than the history channel
No one really interested in history watches the History Channel now.
If this were produced by the History Channel, they'd be talking about how angels are actually aliens and the recipe is code for channeling a dimension door.
Any time I see someone mention the history channel it makes me miss modern marvels
The History Channel doesn’t really DO History any more, do they?
That dr.evil impression was the best
so this recipe is an old one. My grandparents are in their late 90s and my grandmother has collected cookbooks from years past, specifically a local farm town community of women here in Iowa. Every year since around the towns inceptions in 1856, women in the community put together a cookbook every year with recipe's from women in the community. everyone from my grandmother, great grandmother, great great grandmother have recipe's in this book every year. Well recently we found a large stockpile of these books going back to 1890 that my grandmother had been hoarding. So where am I going with this, well one of my favorite foods is angel cake that my grandmother has been making since I was young, she cannot cook anymore due to age and I decided to try some recipes' for it out of some of these books to find the one she uses. I found one that is almost identical to this one, however it comes with a homemade whip sort of egg frosting to go on the outside of this. Its a strange frosting but when you eat it, it makes your tongue tingle a bit... and its so damn good. Angel cake by itself is boring but this "frosting" makes it 12000x better! A lot of the recipe's in these books are also similar... a lot of dash of this, thimble of that...
I Love finding those old community cookbooks, I have a few from flea markets & such, one of my favorites has a joke recipe for elephant & rabbit stew, lol
My grandmother's recipes were basically "add enough of it until it looks good" lol I like to follow recipes, but I often play with them too to make them my own.
Fannie Farmer and Joy of Cooking were my bibles when I was learning to cook as a little girl. I still have both and plan to give copies to my son when he moves out on his own. Also, you need to try grilled angel food cake. Just lightly brown it on the grill and serve with an assortment of fruits and toppings. Delish!
Love the idea of giving a cook book as a wedding gift. My mom has a tradition where she gets a vintage copy of The New Antoinette Pope school cookbook and gives it to each new couple as a wedding gift. My grandma use to say it was the most important book in her home because “If you try cooking with the Bible you are gonna starve”. Grandma was awesome :)
My great-great grandmas receipe book had a receipe for waffles - ingredient: "for 10 pennies cinnamon".... ^^
I feel you there lol… my great grandma had recipes in monme (3.75g)
@@RikuIshmaru Ouch. ^^
The receipe of my great-grandma turned out niecely, if not a TIIIIIIIIINY bit much. She started with "use 24 eggs".
Big family back then ^^
10 pennies as in weight or the amount it could buy?
I have a handwritten notebook with recipes my great grandma wrote. It has instructions such as 'the blue christmas cup full of flower and a small soup bowl full of milk' - those recipes use specific cups, pots and pans she owned. And she used to bake cake in a sawed off metal bucket because she didn't have a proper baking container for cake. There are a lot of magazine and newspaper cutouts with recipes in that notebook too, though.
@@Katharina-rp7iq I just cooked some rice and I always measure how much I need with that one coffee cup - some things never change.
It does sound like a great treasure to have. Even if you don't have the cups she used.
I love that this was today's video. I made my first ever angel food cake today, and it was a chocolate one to boot! I wondered about the history of it a bit while making it, and watched this while spreading chocolate whipped cream on it. 😋 Incidentally, I made custard a few days ago and found my recipe while looking for something to do with so many egg whites...
If you still have some of your custard, I just saw a comment that it is excellent to make a French toast out of your angel food cake by dipping it in custard, frying it, and serve it with maple syrup and ice cream.
Ha. Having raised show chickens as a kid I'm amazed they marketed eggs by breed. I could never tell much difference (it's more what you feed them) - and having raised Turkish Sultans for show, I'm amazed they actually sold the eggs specifically (those are incredibly fancy ornamental show birds with feathered head-crests and feathered legs)
I can definitely tell the difference between our Marans and other bird eggs (larger, and somehow richer? Even though they have the same diet as our other girls). The bantam eggs are also nice, because they’re so small and rich, but I can see why someone would prefer Marans eggs versus other breeds!
In Colorado at the feed store they sold only the meat breeds cause it would get too cold for skinny egg layers chickens. I had a white Orpington and Barred Rock Chickens, strictly pets.
I never can tell the difference between my chickens eggs either. Duck eggs now, they are a very different texture. I have never had Maran chickens or eggs.
@@KayElayempea Now where I CAN tell the difference is fresh eggs vs. store bought. Totally different product and consistency.
One of my favorite units of measurement is the "Gallup." It referred to molasses. When you turn up the jug to a steep pour you hear "Gallup" "Gallup..." A dozen gingerbread cookies calls for two gallups.
In honor of your big day, I’m going to make one of your favorite desserts, and eat it in front of you. And you can’t have any. Happy Birthday, Shelley! 🥳 🎂
🤣 sort of true
@@dallasl3688 🤣 also true
One year my family made a birthday cake for my grandmother and dad. They were out of state, so we sent pictures and enjoyed it.
@@sarahtaylor4264 I have an aunt who despises cake but she's heartbroken if no one bakesa cake because everyone else love it and she's hoping to be able to blow out the candles when she hits 70!
@@dallasl3688 Townsend's said he was a nice guy. Good enough for me!
"I was right!"
I mean, obviously, Max, that raspberry puree plus that angel food cake, it just screams "winning combo"! :P
The best explanation I ever heard for not greasing the pan when making cake was "How would you like to climb up a greased wall?"
You are like "Answers with Joe" but with food.If you don't know him,it's a compliment :-) This may be the best RUclips channel for food in existence right now.Thank you for all your work and the genuine love you bring to this subject.Not regretting leaving the House of Mouse are ya?
Thank you! And no, definitely made the right decision.
The opening reminds me when my brother asked my mom for a recipe and later complained how the only number in the whole recipe was "1/2" in half and half
I love my family's Fannie Farmer cookbook - she learned to cook after recovering from illness, like me, and there is incredible practicality to the original versions (and some updates by her students) that makes them so easy for disabled users. A lot of it is just 'layer these ingredients in an oven dish, put them in a hot oven, let them stew for an hour or two with a bit of flour and stock, and you have a very nice hot meal with minimal effort.' The kind of cooking my French-trained father would never allow, but I rely on a lot as an adult.
"Heavens to Betsy!" This expression needs to make a comeback.
I sometimes say it after watching too many old movies
Also: "my stars!"
I remember my eight-grade social studies teacher had that as a catchphrase, along with "Whoa Nelly!" He was cool.
“I was right” was my favorite line in the whole show!
Eagerly awaiting an episode on Caviar, and a sponsorship where you get a bunch of free caviar. Rock on
Max, if I must say, you are the Ryan Reynolds of RUclips. You are presentable, all around lovable personality, you quote things you love and/or appreciate. And I'm sure I'm not the first to notice that you put little hints in your background 🤫 meaning your pokemon plushies and whatnot. I'm super psyched for your cookbook and I'll buy it as soon as it's available. Love your content man, keep up the good work buddy!
Fanny Farmer was my first cookbook and I'm on a 3rd copy having worn out the first 2.
I am a professional baker and we weigh everything! It’s good to see that being taught to the public. Growing up, no one I knew ever weighed anything and I wasn’t taught to weigh either until I made it a career.
My aunt almost never measured by anything other than sight. Incredible food. I still can’t get close to her stuff years down the line.
Same with many experiencedcooks
That’s how my grandma taught me. Every day I’m grateful for her .
My mom was the same! I always begged her to write down her recipes for me but she said she couldn't because she never measured anything "just until it looks right" lol Now here I am trying to go by memory to make her recipes! So far only one down
My mother did too and the recipes I do of hers I measure with the palm of my hand. But her baking was atrocious because she didn't like doing it so I taught my self from a cookbook "madame Benoit encyclopedia of Canadian cooking" which was published in the 60s as a monthly supplement by the grocery store.
@@milyluv16
Same here. I finally just was able to make my mom’s tomato-based stuffed bell pepper mixture by eye and tasting as I went along a few nights ago (with a couple of slight alterations, as I like cheese and a bit of lemon juice in mine). I was quite pleased with myself haha. It took me quite a few rounds to get to this point.
I still have my mother's Fannie Farmer Cookbook which she got back in the 1940s when she became a wife and homemaker. She made the Fannie Farmer Angel Food Cake every year for my uncle's birthday starting back in the 1960s. He was one of the first people to have a special heart procedure and went on a very strict low fat, high fiber diet for the rest of his 95 years after suffering a major heart attack. And he loved my mom's lighter-than-air Angel Food Birthday Cake with macerated berries because my mom was a wonderful baker, as are you. She had that magic touch and loved to please her family with special cakes for each and every one's birthday. What a lovely tradition, which she passed along to me and my sister. We used to sing a song in grammar school, "Helping mother bake a cake you'd think was fun. It smells so good you can hardly wait till the baking's done." Thanks for reminding me of personal history as well as the great culinary history which you cover with such panache.
Clefable, my personal all time favorite . The original fairy 🧚♂️ pokemon, they would love angel cake since they also need to stay light to hop and dance around moon stones.
I've been using my mom's Fannie Farmer cookbook since I was a kid. It was GREAT to finally learn some history about her, making her more than just a name on a book!
She sounds like a pretty amazing woman who doesn’t get nearly enough credit these days. That’s one heck of a career!
She sold 360,000 copies of her cookbook in her lifetime. Even now that would be considered a pretty successful book. But lecturing at Harvard, starting your own culinary school? Yep, my hat is off to her.
She looked like a badass too.
@@ellencameron3775 and being a woman doing so at that time too.
We heard plenty about her when I went to culinary school for the Corps back in the 80s. She had a paper on upsizing recipes that may still be used today.
I have a print of the facsimile 1896 edition, complete with her handwritten emendations. I still use her pound cake recipe.
Fannie taught me everything I know about the basics of cooking and serving food! I grew up memorizing her recipes, with their crosshatched, step-by-step illustrations. And now I write cookbooks for a living.
The clip where Max is sipping his coffee: sublime! "He looks sooo handsome!!!"
Max, I watch a lot of content on RUclips. That moment when you were drizzling the coulis onto the cake, gently singing, followed by your calm exclaimations that it was going to be good? Not just unique, but heartwarming and enjoyable. I'm thankful that you can approach your channel with such apparent enjoyment and quiet enthusiasm. Keep it up, Max. You're doing wonderfully.
I learned to cook from my grandparents and the gift of a 1940's edition of Fannie Farmer. I still consider it my "kitchen bible" and have that same book, albeit stained, noted in and taped together.
This is my favorite "show" on RUclips!!! I love Max, I love the humor, history and recipes!! Keep up the excellent work!!!
I remember having one of those handheld beaters. We even had one of the really old fashioned ice cream makers. Angel food cake with whipped cream and berries as one of my favorite things
I still have mine. They can still be found at L.L. Bean
Um... did you or anyone ever get their hair tangled up in one? Just me? OK.
@@julieneff9408 I can only speak for myself..no. Thank heavens 😊. Electric mixers are much more dangerous.
@@graceandglory1948 You can let little kids use those hand operated beater gadgets, but a bad idea to let them use electric mixers.
I used those manual beaters for years, as a kid. They'll only work if you're turning them and won't go that fast unless you're really really cranking away furiously. And even so, you need to use both hands just to operate it so you can't get fingers caught in the beaters.
@@SY-ok2dq I agree 👍😊
We used the Fannie Farmer cookbook in my high school home economics class.
I'm so glad you plugged The Butchering Art! I read it last summer and just loved it. Bellevue by David Oshinsky is a really good read as well and in a similar vein.
I’ll have to get that one.
Read both - recommended!
My grandma's cookbook has a recipe that measures in "mustard cup". It was a little glass about 185ml and they don't make them anymore. We have one, but if it breaks we're doomed😂
My mother used to make this for my birthday every year. She put the cake pan onto a full coke bottle to hang it upside down. We always ate it with whipped cream or frosting.
My mom would make angel food cake for my birthday when I was young, too. I got to choose the color of cake and frosting. It was fun deciding on colors.
Fond memories of the Fanny Farmer cookbook!
When my mother started to teach me how to cook - I was 7 - I was to read the recipe from Fanny Farmer. By recipe I mean the basics because I was sous cheffing for her (I had a title that I thought was neato). How to measure and weigh properly, beat egg whites, later how to cut vegetables into fine dice, regular dice, how to prepare artichokes and asparagus, etc. That version was from my grandmother who was a nurse and used the recipes for the sick copiously, as well as basic recipes.
Once I had mastered the basics then I was allowed to graduate to the Gourmet Cookbooks. Her's were leather-bound with a silk ribbon you could use to bookmark your recipe. Very elegant. I still have all these to this day.
With Angel Food Cake, her pan had the feet on them, however, she always filled an empty wine bottle with rice and set the pan upside down on the neck. She swore by this, saying that it circulated more air and kept the top from getting gummy.
Thank you Max!
If your pan doesn’t have the legs you can put the pan on a bottle through the center hole so that the cake is suspended. That’s probably a better choice than resting the cake on a wire rack. The suspension of the cake is key to keeping all the air and volume in the cake.
Max, a chap called Ignaz Semmelweis predated Lister by about 15 years- research conducted in an anustrian maternity hospital in 1847 , but not published until 1851 or so. Fascinating story and well worth a read.
Tuesdays are the best days to have birthday because it's Max' upload day! And angel cake fits so well to the ocasion!
I've asked my Southern grandmother for some of her recipes and her measurements always call for "heaped" cups. But mostly it's because she's been cooking for 70 years and just works everything by eye until the consistency looks right to her.
You have managed to combine my two greatest passions in life - history and food. Thank you so much Max! Your videos always brighten my day.
Hey Max! I'm pretty sure you're not gonna read this by now, but in case you do, I just wanted to tell you that, after watching most episodes, it feels like you are an old friend. Watching them feels like meeting with an old friend after a good while. Please keep on doing your wonderful work. I send you a hug from the heart of South America!
People like Fannie Merritt Farmer are true heros of history, dedicating their whole life to improving people's lives with food. There is no goal in life more noble!
Love that you show the Parthian Chicken recipe when discussing "modern recipe format" - one of the truly ancient recipes you've shown on the channel!
Keep up the great work, Max. Your channel is the best part of Tuesday.
I learned to cook using a later edition of her cookbook (post 1940 edition). The instructions are amazing and very detailed and possibly better than any modern cookbook I have used.
I love always checking the left side to see what thematic pokemon you chose for this video.
Thank you so much for telling Fannie's history and impact on our food culture! She was my first cookbook and I still love it!
That was a really good Dr. Evil impression.
One of my favorite cakes. Angel food, Devil's food, carrot cake, and German chocolate. But the cake I would LOVE to see you do is pound cake. It has to have some fascinating history and stories.
Real pound cake is a pound each of flour, sugar, eggs, and butter. The eggs are seperated and beaten to provide the only leavening. Also a little nutmeg to cover the eggy taste. It keeps really well.
I have an angel food pan but never knew what the tabs on it were for. I didn't know you were supposed to flip it over and let the cake release itself. I love that I learned something new whenever I watch tasting history.
I love angle food cake! Reminds me of my grandmother. She’d always make them for everyone’s birthdays, and put fresh whipped cream on top, and a berry compote🥰 Yum!
Ignaz Philipp Semmelweis[ July 1818 - 13 August 1865) was the first pioneer of antiseptic procedures. Described as the "savior of mothers" before lister and pasteur
The first cookbook I bought, 30 years ago, the 'Fannie Farmer Cookbook'.
HA! Joseph Lister is my hubbys ancestor and he carries his last name! Which also means he is related to Anne Lister, what a rebel! Hubby is an old punk, go figure... We never knew about the book so thanks for that! I'm getting it pronto as I am a nurse and have a passion for medical history.
Hey, someone else who's read The Butchering Art! That book was a hell of a thing and makes you feel oh so glad Joseph Lister went through what he did to get people to wash their damn hands. ^^
Fannie Farmer's cookbook is still my favorite cookbook to date. I actually just made a quiche today using the recipe within it.
Interesting to choose the example of Fannie Farmer explaining Capsicum, since, in a sense, she was wrong. Her Capsicum may have come from Africa, but the plant itself originates in South and Central America.
But cayenne grows where she says. She was describing cayenne, not paprika or ancho.
Thank you so much Max for the shout out and the birthday wishes! Best cake ever made even better by you!
I wish the coffee selector web would always have explicit parameter about acidity and bitterness
Because I like bitter coffee and hate sour coffee
Same!
Yeah Sour Coffee are Weird for my Palate
I like to make really thin layers of angel food cake in sheet pans, just cuz the best part is the caramelized edges that were in contact with the pan. Some warm rhubarb sauce and fresh whipped cream, yum!
This is genius.