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Chocolate Nut Cake
1/3 cup Cottolene. 2 cups sugar. 4 eggs. 1 cup milk. 2⅓ cups flour. 4 teaspoons baking powder. 1/4 teaspoon salt. 2 squares chocolate melted. 3/4 cup English walnut meats broken in pieces. 1/2 teaspoon vanilla.
PROCESS: Cream Cottolene, add gradually one cup sugar, stirring constantly. Beat egg yolks thick and light, add gradually remaining cup of sugar; combine mixtures. Add melted chocolate. Mix and sift flour, baking powder and salt; add to first mixture alternately with milk. Add nut meats and vanilla, then cut and fold in the whites of eggs beaten stiff. Turn into a well-greased tube pan and bake forty-five minutes in a moderate oven. Cool and spread with boiled frosting.
A straightforward creamed butter-cake in all but one ingredient, which no longer exists. The method — two separate sugar additions, whites folded last — is worth following as written; it is what keeps a cake this heavy with nuts and chocolate from sinking.
- CottoleneA branded shortening of cottonseed oil blended with beef suet, made by N. K. Fairbank and long discontinued. Use 1/3 cup vegetable shortening for the closest texture, or the same amount of unsalted butter for better flavour; butter will tend to give a slightly firmer, less tender crumb.
- Squares of chocolateTwo squares means 2 oz of unsweetened baking chocolate, the standard 1-oz square of the period. Melt over hot water and let it cool to barely warm before adding, so it does not soften or loosen the creamed fat.
- Moderate ovenRoughly 350F by modern equivalence; the book gives no temperatures. Forty-five minutes suits a tube pan of about 9 or 10 inches, though no size is specified; test with a skewer at 40 minutes, as the nuts make the centre look wetter than it is.
- The sugar in two partsHalf the sugar goes into the fat, half is beaten into the yolks. Do not shortcut this into a single creaming step — the yolk-and-sugar ribbon is carrying much of the aeration in a cake with only 1/3 cup of fat.
- Folding the whites"Cut and fold" means exactly that: a spatula down through the centre, across the bottom, up the side. The batter is stiff with chocolate and nuts, so lighten it with a spoonful of the whites first, then fold in the rest.
- English walnut meatsSimply ordinary walnuts, as distinguished from the black walnuts common in American kitchens then. Toast and cool them if you like; the original assumes untoasted.
- Boiled frostingNo recipe is given on this page; boiled frosting of the period was a hot sugar syrup beaten into stiff egg whites, closely related to seven-minute frosting. Any modern seven-minute or Italian meringue frosting stands in directly.
- YieldOne tube cake, 12 to 16 slices. It keeps three or four days well wrapped; the nuts and chocolate keep it moist longer than a plain white cake.
52 Sunday Dinners (1913) was written by Elizabeth O. Hiller and published by the N. K. Fairbank Company, makers of Cottolene — which explains why a cottonseed-oil shortening turns up in the first line of a cake recipe rather than butter or lard. Cookbooks of this kind were among the most effective advertising of the era: a genuinely useful year of menus, with the sponsor's product written into the recipes that called for fat. Cottonseed oil was a by-product of the Southern cotton industry that manufacturers spent the late nineteenth century persuading cooks to eat, first as a lard substitute of the kind Cottolene represented and later, in the hydrogenated products of the Crisco generation that followed, as the basis of the shortenings that dominated American baking for the next eighty years. The cake itself is an ordinary layer-cake batter of the period pushed toward richness with chocolate and walnuts and baked in a tube pan — the "nut cake" was a fixture of Sunday tables, and English walnuts had by then become cheap enough through California cultivation to use by the cupful.