The Cake Recipe That Was a Secret for Two Decades (Published 2022) (2024)

A century ago, chiffon cake did not exist. It did not grace the plates of our forebears, surreal in its fluffiness, with its thousand tiny holes, more air than sugar. It was born of American ingenuity, and perhaps a peculiarly American despair.

In 1927 in Los Angeles, a former insurance agent named, by kismet, Harry Baker, having abandoned a wife and children in Ohio to make a new life in Hollywood, fiddled obsessively with ingredients and measurements in his home kitchen until he came up with the recipe for a cake that was escape incarnate. Baker sold his cakes to the Brown Derby, first to the original, hat-shaped restaurant on Wilshire Boulevard and then to its outpost on North Vine near Paramount Studios. The latter was mobbed by movie stars like Tyrone Power, Claudette Colbert and Clark Gable, who asked Carole Lombard for her hand in marriage in one of the red-leather booths.

Baker’s gossamer creation, with its unbearable lightness of being, dazzled the Derby crowd. The journalist Joseph Hart, in a 2007 piece for The Rake, reported that Baker installed a dozen hot-plate ovens in his bungalow apartment to meet demand. “Finished cakes were set to cool on the porch, where customers retrieved them, leaving two dollars’ payment in the mail slot,” Hart wrote — the equivalent of around $45 today. Barbara Stanwyck ordered the cake for parties; Eleanor Roosevelt asked for the recipe.

It is almost nothing, this cake, and yet so rich: angel and devil at once.

For two decades, Baker refused to divulge his secret. He finally cracked in 1947 and revealed all to General Mills. (How much he was paid he took to the grave when he died in 1974.) Instead of butter, he used vegetable oil in a batter thick with yolks and folded together with glossy peaks of whipped egg whites, curling at the tips. The company unveiled the recipe the following year in a pamphlet titled “Betty Crocker Chiffon.”

How is “chiffon” a word that means both a rag — a castoff piece of cloth — and the lustrous fabric that lets the light through, that makes the most halfhearted attempt to hide the body behind? The cake was called chiffon for its weightlessness, but the name conjures negligees too, and the power of illusions. It is almost nothing, this cake, and yet so rich: angel and devil at once.