Fudge Cake
1/2 Cupful Milk (additional) 1 Teaspoonful Vanilla ¾ Teaspoonful Soda Dissolved in 1 Teaspoonful Boiling Water Cut the chocolate in small pieces and melt it over hot water. Then add the first half cupful of milk, mixed with the egg yolk, beaten, and stir like a custard until it thickens. Stir into this the sugar and Snowdrift, and transfer the mixture to a bowl. Then add the vanilla and, alternately, the flour and salt, sifted together, and the milk. Lastly, beat in the soda and fold in the egg white, whipped stiff. Transfer to a medium-sized dripping-pan, which has been rubbed lightly with Snowdrift, and bake about forty minutes in a moderate oven, 350 degrees F.. Cover with chocolate frosting.
A cocoa-custard cake from a shortening manufacturer's promotional booklet. Note before you start that the ingredient list has been cut off partway through the printing: only the second half cupful of milk, the vanilla and the soda survive with quantities.
- The missing quantitiesThe chocolate, sugar, Snowdrift, flour, salt, egg and first half cupful of milk are all called for in the method but their amounts are lost from the head of the recipe. Anything filled in here would be invention; use a comparable devil's food or fudge cake formula for proportions and follow this method.
- "34 Teaspoonful Soda"Almost certainly a misprint for 3/4 teaspoonful of baking soda, dissolved in a teaspoonful of boiling water. Soda is a common leavening in chocolate cakes of this period, where it can react with the acidity of the chocolate.
- SnowdriftA hydrogenated cottonseed-oil shortening, the brand this book was written to sell. Any modern vegetable shortening behaves the same way; butter will give more flavour but a slightly denser crumb, as it carries water that shortening does not.
- The chocolate custardThis is the hinge. Melting the chocolate over hot water and cooking it with milk and egg yolk until it thickens sets the yolk, and is what gives this style of cake its dense, damp texture. Keep it over water rather than direct heat and pull it as soon as it coats the spoon; a scrambled base is difficult to recover.
- OvenThe recipe helpfully gives the number: 350F, which is what "moderate" meant in this period and still means now.
- "Dripping-pan"A shallow rectangular roasting or sheet pan, not a loaf tin. Sizes varied, but a 9x13-inch pan is a reasonable modern stand-in for a 'medium-sized' one and should work with the forty-minute bake.
- Folding the whiteThe beaten white goes in last, after the soda. Fold it rather than beat it, and get the batter into the pan promptly, since the soda has already begun working in the boiling water.
- YieldA 9x13 pan cuts into 12 to 15 generous squares. The chocolate frosting the recipe calls for is not given on this page.
Snowdrift was one of the major American brands of hydrogenated cottonseed shortening in the early twentieth century, and books like this one were printed to persuade cooks that a manufactured fat could replace butter and lard in everything from pastry to cake. "Fudge cake" belongs to the same moment: cocoa and chocolate had become cheap and reliable enough for home baking, and a wave of dark, moist chocolate cakes appeared under names borrowed from confectionery -- fudge cake, devil's food, chocolate loaf -- all of them advertising richness rather than delicacy. The custard step here cooks chocolate with milk and yolk before it meets the batter.