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Chocolate Cake
1 2 cup powdered Sugar, Eggs, 1 cup powdered Sugar, 1/2 cup Butter or Lard (or half of each) 1¼ cups Flour, 2 Squares of Choco- 1 cup sour Milk, 1 teaspoonful late, The Great "Arm & Hammer" Soda.
Cream together the sugar and shortening, (butter or lard); have the shortening partly melted so it will cream better. Add the eggs one at a time, and after the batter is light and creamy, pour into it slowly the sour milk with The Great "Arm & Hammer" Soda dissolved in it.
It takes about one and a quarter cupfuls of sifted cake flour to make a smooth cake batter, and not too stiff. First stir into the above batter half the flour, then pour in while stirring two squares of melted chocolate. To melt the chocolate, cut into small bits in a deep saucer and add 1/4 cup of lard or butter to it. Set into oven or over slow fire until both chocolate and lard are melted; stir together, then pour into batter. Add the rest of the flour after the chocolate. If too stiff, add a little more sweet milk. Bake in greased paper-lined loaf cake pan or bread pan. 1 cup Butter (or Lard)
A plain sour-milk chocolate loaf cake from a soda maker's promotional pamphlet. The method is sound; the ingredient column has been set in two interleaved lines, so read the instructions rather than the list for quantities.
- The hinge: soda and sour milkThe teaspoon of soda is dissolved in the sour milk and added to the creamed batter, so the gas begins forming immediately. Have the pan greased and paper-lined and the oven hot before you start mixing, and get it in without delay.
- Sour milk substitutePeriod sour milk was raw milk clabbered naturally and is mildly acidic. Use buttermilk cup for cup, or 1 cup whole milk with 1 tablespoon lemon juice or white vinegar stirred in and left to stand ten minutes.
- Powdered sugarIn American books of this era "powdered sugar" means finely granulated white sugar, not the cornstarch-cut confectioners' sugar sold under that name today. Ordinary granulated sugar is the correct reading.
- Squares of chocolateTwo squares means 2 oz of unsweetened baking chocolate, the standard 1-oz square of the period. Modern bars are scored in varying sizes, so weigh rather than count squares.
- Chocolate and fatThe quarter cup of butter or lard melted with the chocolate appears to be over and above the half cup creamed with the sugar, though the garbled ingredient column leaves this uncertain. It keeps the chocolate fluid so it disperses evenly when it hits the cool batter; let it cool slightly, to just warm, before pouring in.
- OvenNo temperature is given. A loaf cake of this size wants a moderate oven, 350F, for roughly 40 to 50 minutes, until a skewer in the centre comes out clean.
- FlourCake flour is specified and matters here, since the batter is soft and the crumb is meant to be tender. If you substitute all-purpose, remove about 2 tablespoons per cup.
- YieldOne 8 x 4 inch loaf, about ten slices. No frosting is called for.
Arm & Hammer's recipe booklets circulated as advertising for saleratus and baking soda, and their recipes serve largely to demonstrate the product; hence the capitalised, trademarked "The Great 'Arm & Hammer' Soda" appearing mid-sentence in the ingredient list. Sour-milk cakes like this one are the older half of American chemical leavening: before baking powder was cheap and reliable, a cook supplied the acid herself from the clabbered milk that any household with a milk cow had in surplus, and the soda did the rest. The offer of "butter or lard, or half of each" is equally of its period, when lard was the everyday shortening and butter is often said to have been the costlier choice, kept for company baking.