Harold Baker: Chiffon Cake

Today, we celebrate two inventions baked into one.

Oil is the Key

The story of the Wesson Oil and Snowdrift Companies begins at the Southern Cotton Oil Company founded in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania on March 5, 1887.

From the 1770s to the 1880s agriculturists and cooks sought to develop culinary oils from plants. Thomas Jefferson's attempts to introduce the olive into the agriculture of the United States, as a partial substitute for lard in cookery met with limited success...In the first decades of the nineteenth century, planter experimentalists began the commercial scale production of benne oil, establishing it as the primary salad oil and the second favored frying medium in the southern United States. It enjoyed acceptance and moderate commercial success until the refinement of cottonseed oil in the 1870s and 1880s. Cotton seed, a waste product of the south's most cotton vital industry, was turned into a revenue stream as David Wesson and other scientists created a salad oil and frying medium designedly tasteless and odorless, and a cooking fat, hydrogenated cottonseed oil (Cottonlene or Crisco) that could cheaply substitute for lard in baking. Gastronomica: The Journal of Food and Culture

The Cake

The notion of combining beaten egg whites into a batter prepared with egg yolks and oil belongs to creator and professional baker, Harry Baker. Baker owned a Hollywood pastry shop at 341 Larchmont Boulevard in Los Angeles, California. bake me a cake...