CHRISTOPHER KIMBALL: Welcome to Milk Street's My Family Recipe.
We help home cooks rediscover and recreate lost family recipes.
- My grandmother Margaret's was the absolute best.
- Don't put any pressure on us or anything!
CHRISTOPHER: We bring home cooks to our Boston studio...
I'm gonna stand back.
...where, along with our host and pastry chef Cheryl Day... - Isn't it great how food can take you back?
CHRISTOPHER: ...we teach them how to make their family recipe from scratch.
- You're gonna be able to bake this cake.
- I can do it.
CHRISTOPHER: Just the way it was made by, say, their grandmother.
- Beautiful!
- Grandma would not tolerate lumps.
CHRISTOPHER: Then we send them home to recreate that recipe for the toughest audience... - There it is.
CHRISTOPHER: ...their own family.
[laughing] CHRISTOPHER: Can our home cooks pull it off?
- Mom, that's really good.
- I think that's a yes.
CHRISTOPHER: Or will the recipe be lost forever?
Right here on Milk Street's My Family Recipe.
- That is delicious.
[upbeat music playing] Funding for this series was provided by the following.
Mowi Salmon comes ready to cook.
Ready to grill, ready to season, or pre-seasoned and ready to eat.
In an assortment of flavors for an assortment of people.
Mowi Salmon.
- I'm Linda White, and we're in Fort Washington, Pennsylvania.
And this is my sidekick and sous chef, Ernie.
Fort Washington is a suburb of Philadelphia.
I come from a rather large extended family, which is hundreds of cousins, had reunions every single summer.
It was always a very family oriented way to live.
My grandmother, Florence, was the oldest girl of 11 children.
Being the oldest girl, she was forced to drop out of school to help her mother care for all of her siblings.
Despite the fact that she had to drop out of school, she was one of the smartest and most learned people that I've ever known.
And she was very community oriented.
This one group she was a part of, they called it the Girls Club, and they would get together every month and go to each other's homes for lunch to play cards.
But what stands out to me the most is they would swap recipe cards.
My grandmother, Florence, started a recipe book.
It was almost like a scrapbook.
She would get recipes and she would write it in this book.
She would attribute the recipe to the person where it originated.
There was one recipe in the book that I remember so vividly.
It's titled Adena's Hot Milk Sponge Cake.
To the best of my memory, Adena was a neighbor.
I don't know how it happened, but this is a cake that was part of my childhood.
The cake had a little hint of citrus to it, but it was light and airy.
It was a cake that showed up at every reunion, at every dinner party, at every picnic.
It was like the macaroni and cheese of cakes.
The recipe is a train wreck.
It's a list of ingredients.
No instructions on how to put it together.
All of the dry ingredients, the vanilla, the orange rind... Oh, wait, we need to beat the egg whites.
But in what order?
What do we do with all this stuff?
I pick up that book and I feel like my grandmother is with me still.
I can feel her spirit and her essence in those pages.
If this cake can come together and I can make it the way I remember it, I would feel like part of my grandmother's been restored.
That part of my family history is being restored.
I'm really excited to get on this call with Chris and Cheryl.
I've never tried a Milk Street recipe that has not worked for me.
So, I have a great deal of faith that they'll be able to solve this one.
- Hi, Linda.
- Hi, Linda.
- Hi.
- I'm Cheryl and Chris.
We're excited to meet you and to hear about this recipe.
- I'm super excited to tell you about it.
- I've never made a hot milk sponge.
- It comes out of this recipe book that my grandmother kept.
- This is a really interesting recipe because why hot milk?
What does it do for the cake?
- That's what was sort of baffling to me.
You got eggs in there and you're going to pour in hot milk.
How hot?
And then below that, it says, two cups of flour.
[laughter] - Can we meet your sous chef?
It sounds like, they had something to say.
Oh, wow!
What's his name?
- This is Ernie.
- Ernie.
Ernie, do you know this secret to the recipe?
- He says no, but I'll pick up anything you drop.
- Ernie looks like he's light as a sponge cake.
- Yeah, true.
What is your memory of this cake?
- Definitely a spongy cake.
It's very light and airy, and it was always in a tube can.
- Right.
Like an angel food cake, yeah.
- I tried to make it a couple of times, but no go.
- We're going to do our best, Linda, to try to recreate this recipe, if you'll give us about a week.
- I get to eat sponge cake every day for a week.
- We're going to invite you in here to Milk Street, let you taste it and see how we did.
- Don't get too tired of it now.
- Okay.
- Linda, it's been a pleasure.
Great to meet you.
- Thank you.
You also.
- See you soon.
- Bye-bye.
- Hope she brings Ernie.
I mean, come on.
So I don't think in New England, my special area, we didn't make a hot milk sponge cake.
I think it's a Pennsylvania thing, probably.
It'd be really interesting to find out, why hot milk?
- Right, I'm really curious about the hot milk and if it has something to do with the temperature of, you know, warming up the eggs.
- We'll go do our own.
- We'll find out.
- We'll find out.
- One of the recipes neither of us has made is hot milk sponge cake.
Now, in my case, the reason is it sounds like a genoise to me.
That's a French cake that's made with whole eggs beaten with sugar and some hot melted butter is added in.
Problem is, genoise is the most difficult cake in the world to make.
I've tried it a dozen times.
It's come out well maybe twice.
Sponge cakes came after yeasty cakes in the early 19th century in America.
The whipped egg whites provided the rise and they were used all the time, in fact, there are old recipes like Martha Washington pie, which is a two-layer sponge with some jam in the center and some confectioner's sugar on top.
The hot milk sponge cake is different.
It has a little baking powder in it that ensures that it's going to rise properly.
And you actually add, obviously, hot milk to the batter.
There are a lot of mysteries around the hot milk.
So, we need to go into the kitchen and start the development process.
- So, here we have the classic conundrum.
Just ingredients, no instructions.
We've got to figure out what this hot milk is all about.
So Rose, our star baker here at Milk Street, is on the case.
Not difficult to figure out how this cake comes together.
It's pretty basic.
You have dry ingredients.
You have whipped egg whites.
But then there's that milk.
The hot milk came from the need to pasteurize it at home.
But did it make a difference in how the cake tasted?
Rose baked a few different cakes here.
We tried it with cold milk, room temperature milk, hot milk.
- Hi, Courtney.
Will you try these?
Malcolm, can you try these?
Hey, Dimitri.
Get in here.
So, this is cold milk, room temp and hot.
I don't know if you can tell the difference.
- The cold tastes a little chewier to me.
The hot has that, like, spring.
- So this is drizzling the hot right in.
I didn't think it would make a difference, - but it really does.
- Angel food with some oomph.
The hot milk version by far the best.
And even though Linda is not a big baker, I think we've given her a great roadmap to success.
- Surprised, I didn't think the hot would make that much of a difference, but I think it does, yeah.
- So, Linda is coming up from Philadelphia to try our version of the hot milk sponge.
We love this cake.
I hope she does, too.
- We're so excited to have you.
And I see you have that book of recipes.
- I brought the bible.
- So, it has all of the ingredients.
- It's a little short.
- A little short of directions.
But my favorite thing is bake it 350, 50 to 60 minutes.
- Two cups flour.
[laughing] - We used to joke all the time that there's something missing in the recipe that made it not come out.
- Two cups flour.
- All the directions maybe.
- I have our flour here and our leavening, which is baking powder.
- In most sponge cakes, they didn't use - baking powder.
- Very true.
- They didn't have baking powder till the 1850s.
- Exactly.
So, we have some salt and then I'm going to whisk that together.
And Chris, if you could zest us some orange.
- And I'm going to also heat up the milk.
- Right.
It's good to zest right over what you're doing because all the oils, which have a ton of the flavor end up on the wood cutting board, not in the ingredients.
- Now how hot will you heat the milk?
- Just the bubbles, just sort of scalds around the perimeter.
Not to a boil.
- Just under.
So he's heating that up.
And then we're going to mix up the egg.
- I'm watching Chris and Cheryl start to put this cake together, and I see a hundred mistakes that I made when I made a feeble attempt at it.
- So I'm adding in the sugar.
So, we've got one cup going in with the yolks, and you want to kind of gradually add that in.
And then I'm going to add in the other cup into the whites.
- The egg yolks and egg whites are handled separately.
I'm so lucky to be here and be able to learn these things.
- So we've got our milk.
- So you do want to drizzle this in.
If you added it all in one plop, you'd be worried about cooking the egg.
- Perfect.
Then, I'm going to add in the vanilla, and then I'm going to mix this until it's just incorporated.
So now, I'm going to add in the flour.
- So, what makes a cake tough?
- Over-mixing.
- Over-mixing.
- You're building gluten.
- There's protein and gluten in the flour.
- Much like kneading bread.
- See, you know.
- A little.
- Finish this by hand, give it a quick mix.
And now we're going to add the egg whites.
And then this is the last cup of sugar.
- So, how stiff are they going to be?
- So it's more like a silky meringue.
And sometimes, people over-whip egg whites when they're folding it in and-- - They're chunky.
- Exactly.
- Now it's getting glossy.
- I see the streaks.
- So, it's kind of a loose batter.
It'll thicken up a little bit.
- It's nice and glossy and it's marshmallowy.
- Beautiful.
- Is that a term you ever use?
Marshmallowy?
- Marshmallowy.
You want to take a little bit of this... to kind of lighten the batter.
So, we're going to fold in, and it's a true fold from the bottom up to lighten the batter.
So, Linda, did you ever make this recipe with your grandmother or your mom?
- I would have watched her make it.
- Does this look familiar?
- Not even close.
- Oh, no!
- There you go, Cheryl.
You never ask a question you don't want the answer to.
You'd be a terrible lawyer.
- When I was watching my grandmother make this cake, I was a child, maybe in my teens.
I don't think I ever paid attention to exactly what she did to make it work.
And now, I'm watching Chris and Cheryl and I am taking notes.
I-- I don't remember it being handled separately.
- Oh!
- Really.
- All right, this is almost where I need it to be.
So, I want you to do this last fold just so you can kind of get a feeling because I'm going to turn a baker out of you yet.
- That's right.
- So basically, you just literally fold from the bottom.
Perfect.
Yes.
See?
You got that last bit on the bottom.
And then, Linda, we're going to pour this into our pan, and we're going to pop it into the oven at 325.
That should be preheating.
And it's going to bake for 50 to 60 minutes is exactly - what your grandmother said.
- That's right.
- And then it'll pop right out bottom.
How are you feeling about this recipe?
- I can do that.
- You can do it.
- I can do that.
- Okay, so now, you're going to take a spatula and just kind of loosen the sides.
- You cooled that upside down, right?
- Yes, we did cool it upside down.
Inside.
Gotta loosen this guy.
Oh, this looks beautiful.
Delicately turn it out onto your cake plate.
- Like, I'm the one who's gotta-- Let me just make sure.
'Cause I don't wanna-- She's setting me up for failure.
- No, I'm not.
We just needed his magic touch.
Ta-da!
Gorgeous.
Does that look like your grandmother's cake?
- It does.
- We got it out of the pan.
- It looks beautiful.
- So this wasn't in your grandmother's original recipe unless she left it off.
- I only remember her doing that if she was taking it to someone.
- Well, in her honor, we thought we'd add a special fancy-it-up flourish of simple powdered sugar on top.
- It looks exactly like I remember it looking.
And once Cheryl's putting the powdered sugar on top, I'm thinking, "This is it.
This is the cake."
- Three beautiful slices.
That looks exactly like I remember it looking.
- And we're going to let you try it first.
- Get some forks.
- Oh, no.
It's finger food.
- Total finger food.
- Okay.
All right.
- Now the moment of truth.
- Here we go.
Oh.
Oh.
I'm only kidding.
It's delicious.
- She had us going.
- That is delicious.
It is exactly the right level of orange.
The texture of the cake.
- This is awesome.
- That's better than good.
You guys are eating without a fork, right?
- That's finger food, I'm telling you.
- That is delicious.
- The thing I like about this-- I'm going to make this all the time now-- is a lot of sponge cakes are, the texture is good, but it's a little flimsy.
I like the fact this has a little bit of cake to it.
- Yeah.
It's super airy.
- Yeah.
- We wanted to really make sure that we honored your grandmother.
So, what do you think she would think?
- She'd be very sorry that we've been able to duplicate it, but-- - No, she would love this.
This is amazing.
- How are you feeling about making this at home?
- I can do this.
[dog barking] - All right, Ernie, what is it?
I have the recipe.
Now, the pressure's on to duplicate that cake.
Right on the money.
You think it's cookie time?
I'm feeling a little bit anxious, but very excited.
You can have cookies when we have cake.
All right, let's see.
Put eggs in there.
I've got my flour, baking powder and salt.
There's a fear of the unknown there.
Let's see, orange zest.
The process is all going to work.
Let's preheat the oven.
And if the cake is really going to be what I expect it to be.
Looks like about a tablespoon.
Let's do our sugar.
Separating my sugar and get ready to heat the milk.
I'm looking at the batter... ...and thinking it doesn't look exactly right.
But it doesn't dawn on me.
Oh, my God, I forgot the flour.
The flour was sitting on the counter next to me.
Florence is here today and was trying to make sure that I was not able to recreate this cake.
That's what I think.
Okay.
I cannot believe after going through all of this, I forgot to add the flour.
Let's regroup and deal with the flour.
Going to need my floor cleaners.
Almost there.
My heart's beating a little bit faster than usual.
All right, let's see if we can do this without cooking our eggs.
All right, cross your fingers.
Yes!
We did it!
Into the oven.
All right, guys, 45 minutes and we'll check it.
- I can't wait.
- Hungry?
- Well, yeah.
Been smelling the cake baking all day.
- So tasting it today will be my husband, Ed, my dad, Don, and his wife, Sandy.
All right, there we go.
Cool for an hour.
- Nanny was my mother-in-law, and she was a good cook, good baker.
- All right, here we go.
I think maybe once my dad actually tastes it and sees it, it may bring back those same card playing evenings of cake and coffee.
- I'm ready to try it out and see if it's as good as Nanny's.
- Get to try this cake after all these years.
I'm a little excited.
Of course.
- All right, here goes nothing.
Holy crap, I think I can bake.
Let's give it a sprinkle.
Okay.
That looks awesome.
Could that be any better?
I'm complimenting myself a lot.
I'm surprising myself a lot.
Grandma would be proud, and I think Chris and Cheryl would be proud, too.
I pick up that book and I feel like my grandmother is with me.
I recognize her handwriting, and I can feel her spirit and her essence in those pages.
- There it is.
- Yay!
- Yay!
- Yeah.
- Hmm, beautiful.
- Beautiful.
- Gorgeous.
- You can be in charge of plates.
Here's the moment of truth.
- Oh, baby.
- Look at that.
- We seem to be a fork short.
So I'll just use my hands.
- I use my fingers.
It's all just finger food.
This is the hot milk sponge cake that Nan used to make.
It showed up everywhere.
Family reunion, church picnics, you name it.
It was the cake.
Does it look familiar?
- Looks familiar, yeah.
- So, can we dig in?
- Mmm.
Very good.
- My turn?
- Your turn.
- Oh, okay, I'm not bothering with a fork.
- No pressure.
- Mmm.
I get the orange.
Just a hint.
Just enough to give it some flavor.
- And I'm not politely waiting.
I'm just not.
- And does it taste like you remember?
- Exactly.
Tastes exactly.
That little bit-- Like a little crispiness on the top of the crust.
But, it's moist.
- I think Ernie did really good at his part.
- He did.
Taste your-- - Ernie's holding the rug down.
After hearing about this cake for all these years, I was not disappointed, it was delicious.
I was really happy.
- How's that?
- Oh, yes, please.
I would take another piece.
I'm going to have this cake tomorrow with my coffee.
- This cake never lasted long in the house.
- I can believe it.
- Want me do it again tomorrow?
- Any time you want to, you can do it.
- I can?
- Sure.
- I had two slices, and I think that's enough.
Well, tomorrow that's a different story.
- This whole process has been a journey, and it just has evoked so many emotions and so many memories.
All the stories that Nan used to tell, you never think you're going to forget them and you forget.
She used to make the cake.
Remember all the games of pinochle.
- Oh, yeah.
Me playing cards.
More talking than playing.
- Getting this cake done right and remembering more about what her grandmother did is exciting for her.
She lived with her grandmother growing up, so she has a bunch of old photographs.
- Came across 1966.
It's the reunion photos.
- Oh, boy.
- She reminisces a lot and this cake's another piece of her grandmother.
- I'm feeling a little emotional right now.
- Over to Aunt Bea's for picnics.
- Yep.
Fourth of July.
If anybody could be here, I would want my grandmother, of course, and my mom.
I miss them both every day, so this is super meaningful.
Little did Adena know what this cake would mean to all of us.
Parade went right past our house.
- I remember that.
- I'm so happy to be able to share not just the cake, but, you know, my memories and my feelings.
- Thank you.
- I can't possibly eat anymore.
- I'm sure.
- Thank you.
- You know, everybody's, well, wrong about whipping egg whites.
Stiff peaks is what most recipes call for.
Now, I was at Claire Ptak's Violet Bakery in East London a few years ago, and she showed me how she whipped her egg whites, which is not even to soft peaks, very soft, and it was very easy to incorporate those whites into the batter, and it turns out you've got great lift and great texture.
So let's start at the beginning.
If you whip your egg whites with no sugar, you can tell this foam is not stable.
And when you fold this in, or try to fold it into a cake batter, it's just going to fall apart, and you're not gonna get good height.
So the basic rule is one tablespoon of sugar to two egg whites.
These egg whites have sugar in them, but we've taken them a little bit too far.
These are very stiff.
Right, you have a stiff peak, and a lot of people and a lot of recipes, go like, "Oh, this is a stiff peak, this is fine."
But if you try to fold this into batter, this is a chocolate cake.
You can tell they're folding in, but it's not easy.
You still have large patches of whites.
So let's try a better method, which is to slightly underwhip the whites.
You start by aerating the whites for about 30 seconds.
Then we're going to gradually add the sugar.
One other ingredient we like to add, you could add a little lemon juice or cream of tartar.
This acid helps stabilize the whites as well as sugar does.
So we'll add that into this.
It's good to finish egg whites by taking it out of the stand mixer, and using the whisk itself to finish.
This is going to take a little more time, but you have more control over the final product, you're not going to overbeat it.
So that's almost it.
If it's not a stiff peak, it falls over.
Most people would say these are underwhipped, but this is exactly what Claire Ptak showed me.
We'll take a little bit of it.
Fold it in.
So now we have two textures that are very similar.
The lightened batter for the cake and the egg whites.
And so this is going to incorporate much easier.
One last tip from Claire.
She also said you don't have to fold it until you see no streaks of white.
You can see a little bit of white there, so I'm good.
Now let's go get those cakes out of the oven and compare the textures.
You can see there's just a huge difference in these cakes.
I know it's a little counterintuitive to say if you beat to stiff peaks, you actually get less volume when the cake is baked.
That's because you have to destroy some of that foam while you're folding the egg whites into the batter.
So the rule is, if you want great height and great texture, under beat, slightly underbeat your egg whites.
They're easier to fold in, and you'll end up with a better cake.
Recipes and episodes from this season of My Family Recipe are available at MilkStreetTV.com/MFR Access our content any time to change the way you cook.
Funding for this series was provided by the following.
Mowi Salmon comes ready to cook.
Ready to grill, ready to season, or pre-seasoned and ready to eat.
In an assortment of flavors for an assortment of people.
Mowi Salmon.
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