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Black Cake with Prune Filling
1 1/2 cupfuls sugar 1/2 teaspoonful salt 3 eggs 1/2 cupful Crisco 1 cupful milk 1/2 teaspoonful baking soda 2 cupfuls flour 1 teaspoonful baking powder 1/2 teaspoonful vanilla extract 1/3 cake chocolate
For Filling (Cupful sugar cupful boiling)
1 cupful sugar 1/3 cupful boiling water 1 white of egg 1/2 cupful stoned stewed prunes 1/3 cupful blanched chopped almonds For cake. Beat 1 egg in double boiler, add 1/2 cupful milk, 1/2 cupful sugar and chocolate; mix well and cook until it thickens. Cool and set aside. Cream Crisco with remainder of sugar, add salt, eggs well beaten, soda mixed with remainder of milk, flour, baking powder and vanilla. Mix well and add chocolate paste, and divide into two Criscoed and floured layer cake tins. Bake twenty minutes in moderate oven.
For filling. Boil sugar and water together without stirring until it forms a soft ball when tried in cold water, or 240 Degree F., then pour it over the beaten white of egg, beating all the time. Now add chopped prunes and almonds and beat well. Put between layers of cake.
Sufficient for one good-sized layer cake.
What survives here is the ingredient list only, with no mixing method, pan size, oven temperature or filling proportions. The list itself is a standard early twentieth-century layer cake, so the gaps can be read confidently, but a few items need translating.
- No method is givenThe proportions are those of a conventional creamed butter cake: fat and sugar beaten together, eggs, then the flour, salt, powder and soda alternately with the milk, chocolate and vanilla in last. The book gives no oven temperature or time; as a modern working guide, 8-inch layers at 350F take roughly 25 to 30 minutes and a loaf 45 to 50.
- "1/3 cake chocolate"Baking chocolate was sold in blocks of roughly half a pound, scored into squares of one ounce each, so a third of a cake is somewhere between 2 and 3 ounces of unsweetened chocolate. The original is genuinely imprecise; the batter tolerates the range, but at the top end the crumb will be drier.
- CriscoThis book was written to sell it, and the half cupful is simply solid vegetable shortening. Butter or modern shortening substitutes directly by volume; butter gives more flavour and a slightly firmer crumb.
- Soda and baking powder togetherThe soda works on the acidity of natural unsweetened chocolate and also darkens the crumb. Natural rather than alkalised chocolate is the closer match; with heavily alkalised chocolate the soda has less to react with.
- The prune fillingNo quantities appear on this page. Period prune fillings are commonly pitted cooked prunes mashed or sieved to a paste, sweetened to taste and often sharpened with lemon juice, cooked down until it holds its shape on a spoon. Reckon on about a cup of finished paste for two layers.
- What "black cake" means hereHere it is a dark chocolate cake, not the West Indian black cake of dried fruit soaked in rum. Nothing in the list suggests fruit or spirits.
- YieldProbably two 8-inch layers, though the batter volume could stretch to three thinner ones; twelve to sixteen slices.
A Calendar of Dinners is a cookbook published by a shortening manufacturer. Procter & Gamble brought out Crisco in 1911, and Marion Harris Neil was engaged to write the recipe books that taught American cooks to use hydrogenated vegetable fat where they had used butter, lard or suet. That is why a plain chocolate layer cake specifies the brand by name in the middle of its ingredient list. The prune filling reflects a different pressure of the same decades: dried California prunes were cheap, kept indefinitely on the pantry shelf, and cooked down into a sweet paste that stood in for jam or fresh fruit at any season, which is why prune fillings turn up so persistently in cake chapters of this period and so rarely in ours.