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Chocolate Layer Cake
4 squares chocolate. 3 tablespoons boiling water. ⅓ cup Cottolene. 1½ cups sugar. 1/2 cup milk. 2 cups pastry flour. 2 teaspoons baking powder. 1/4 teaspoon salt. 3 eggs. 1/2 teaspoon Vanilla.
PROCESS: Melt chocolate over hot water, add boiling water and cook over hot water until smooth, stirring constantly. Cream Cottolene, add sugar gradually, stirring constantly; add chocolate mixture. Add yolks of eggs well beaten. Mix and sift flour, baking powder and salt, add alternately to first mixture with milk. Add flavoring, and cut and fold in the stiffly beaten whites of eggs. Turn into buttered layer cake pans and bake fifteen minutes in a hot oven. Spread with Boiled Frosting (for recipe see Page 56) and sprinkle with shredded toasted almonds before frosting sets.
A straightforward creamed-butter layer cake, complicated only by a shortening brand that no longer exists and one measurement that cannot be right as printed.
- The Cottolene quantity"1½ cup Cottolene" against 1½ cups sugar and 2 cups flour is far too much fat; the batter would break. ½ cup is the likeliest intended figure, being in line with the proportions of comparable layer cakes of the period. The printed amount is best treated as a typesetting error.
- What Cottolene wasA cottonseed-oil-and-beef-suet shortening sold by the N. K. Fairbank Company, and the reason this book exists. Use ½ cup of vegetable shortening for the closest texture, or the same weight of softened unsalted butter for better flavor.
- Squares of chocolateFour squares means four ounces of unsweetened baking chocolate, sold then and now in scored one-ounce blocks. Semisweet will make the cake noticeably sweeter and softer.
- Pastry flourLower in protein than modern all-purpose. Substitute cake flour, or replace two tablespoons per cup of all-purpose flour with cornstarch.
- "A hot oven" is too hot here"A hot oven" is hotter than these layers want -- in period usage a hot oven is usually reckoned at roughly 400-450F. Thin layers of a batter this sugary can scorch at the edges before the centers set. Baking at 350-375F is safer; at that temperature expect longer than the fifteen minutes printed, around 18-25 minutes for two 9-inch layers, testing the center.
- Melting the chocolateThe three tablespoons of boiling water are added to melted chocolate and cooked until smooth on purpose; this makes a glossy paste that disperses evenly into the creamed fat. Add it while still warm but not hot, or it will seize into grains against the cold shortening.
- Yield and pansEnough for two 8- or 9-inch layers; the recipe specifies only "layer cake pans." "Buttered" pans alone may stick with this batter; line the bottoms with parchment.
- Frosting timingBoiled frosting is a hot sugar-syrup meringue that sets firm within a few minutes. Have the almonds toasted, shredded and within reach before you start spreading, exactly as the instruction implies.
52 Sunday Dinners was written by Elizabeth O. Hiller and published in 1913 as an advertising cookbook for Cottolene, the cottonseed shortening marketed by the N. K. Fairbank Company of Chicago as a modern, more digestible replacement for lard. That commercial purpose explains why a branded fat appears in the ingredient list of an otherwise conventional cake, and why the book is organized as a year of complete Sunday menus rather than as a reference: the household that cooked its way through it would buy Cottolene fifty-two times. The cake itself belongs to the American layer-cake tradition that took hold once chemical baking powder became cheap and reliable in the later nineteenth century, and the finish, boiled frosting with toasted almonds pressed on before it hardened, was a standard flourish of the period's chocolate cakes.