Orange Layer Cake

Using an iconic brand of cake flour.

Swans Down advertisement from the May 29, 1914 edition of the Omaha Daily Bee

In 1853, a farmer named Levi Igleheart, Jr. started a mill in Evansville, Indiana. (He had been born in Kentucky, but his father moved the family to Indiana after encountering land title problems and partially due to his opposition to slavery.)

His brothers joined him in the venture, which operated as Igleheart Brothers. It was Levi’s son Addison, however, who in 1894 discovered a new way of milling wheat that resulted in a lower-protein product. (What that method was, I’m not entirely sure, but I can tell you that modern cake flour is made entirely of the endosperm of wheat, it’s ground more finely than all-purpose flour, and it’s often chlorinated in processing, so any of these could’ve been Addison’s innovation.)

They marketed it as Swans Down Cake Flour, the name intended to evoke lightness and purity. The company was consolidated into General Foods in 1926, but the Swans Down name lives on, purchased by families who have used Swans Down for generations.

From the box of A.D. from Lutz, Florida, by way of Pennsylvania in the 1940s, and originating in Ohio in the 1920s.

---