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Rich Chocolate Cake
1½ cup Cottolene. 1/2 cups sugar. 4 eggs. 4 squares chocolate. 1 teaspoon cinnamon. ⅓ cup hot water. 1/2 cup milk. 2 cups flour. 3 teaspoons baking powder. 1/4 teaspoon salt. 1 teaspoon vanilla.
PROCESS: Cream Cottolene, add sugar gradually, stirring constantly. Melt chocolate over hot water, add hot water specified in recipe and beat immediately into creamed butter and sugar; add yolks of eggs beaten until thick and light. Mix and sift flour, cinnamon, baking powder and salt; add to first mixture alternately with milk, add vanilla. Cut and fold in the stiffly-beaten whites of eggs. Bake in a shallow pan forty to forty-five minutes. Cover with Boiled Frosting (for recipe see Page 56).
A hot-water chocolate cake of the devil's-food type, written for a brand of shortening that no longer exists and printed with at least two garbled fractions. Read the quantities carefully before you start.
- CottoleneA cottonseed-oil shortening sold by the N. K. Fairbank Company, the firm that issued this book. Substitute an equal measure of vegetable shortening, or butter if you want more flavour; the recipe itself slips and calls it "butter" in the method.
- The sugar is mistyped"1/2 cups sugar" cannot be right for four eggs, four squares of chocolate and two cups of flour. Read it as 1½ cups.
- The hot water is also suspect"1½ cup hot water" against only ½ cup milk and 2 cups flour would give a batter close to a pour. Comparable hot-water chocolate cakes of the period use ½ cup. The original is genuinely ambiguous here; ½ cup is the defensible reading.
- Squares of chocolateOne square meant one ounce of unsweetened baking chocolate, so four ounces in all, which is one standard modern 4 oz bar.
- Beat the hot chocolate in at onceThe instruction to add the hot water to the melted chocolate and beat it immediately into the creamed fat is the hinge of the method. The heat softens the shortening and lets the chocolate disperse smoothly through it; if the chocolate is left to cool first it sets into grains in the batter.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given. A moderate oven, around 350F, suits forty to forty-five minutes in a shallow pan.
- The panA "shallow pan" here is most likely a single sheet or square, perhaps around 9 by 13 inches, cut in squares and frosted on top rather than layered. Two 9-inch rounds would be done sooner, nearer 25 to 30 minutes.
- YieldAbout twelve to sixteen squares. The Boiled Frosting referred to is the usual egg-white-and-hot-syrup icing of the period, closer to marshmallow than to buttercream.
52 Sunday Dinners was one of a long run of cookbooks published by the N. K. Fairbank Company to promote Cottolene, a shortening made from cottonseed oil and beef suet that was marketed as a cheaper, cleaner-keeping rival to lard. That commercial purpose explains why Cottolene heads the ingredient list of a chocolate cake; why the method then forgets itself and says "butter" is harder to say. The cake itself belongs to the hot-water chocolate family that spread through American home baking around the turn of the century, once cheap chemical baking powder and reliable block chocolate made a dark, moist, high-rising cake possible in a domestic oven. The teaspoon of cinnamon is a nineteenth-century habit that has largely fallen away; it was long held that a little spice deepens the taste of chocolate rather than announcing itself.