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Chocolate Cake
One cup sugar, two cups flour, one tablespoon butter, two eggs, one teaspoon cream tartar, one-half teaspoon soda, onehalf cup milk, flavor with a teaspoon vanilla; this will make cake for three medium sized jelly tins.
A plain layer batter of the sort late-nineteenth-century books called a chocolate cake — the chocolate belonged to the filling between the layers, not to the batter itself. A few things need translating before it will work in a modern kitchen.
- There is no chocolate hereThe name refers to the finished cake: thin layers, baked separately in the three tins, sandwiched with a chocolate filling or icing. The recipe as printed gives only the plain layers; you will need a separate filling recipe to make what the title promises.
- Jelly tinsThese are shallow round layer pans, roughly 8 to 9 inches across and an inch or so deep — what a modern catalogue sells as a sponge or layer tin. Three of them from this quantity means very thin layers, to be filled generously.
- Cream of tartar and sodaOne teaspoon cream of tartar with half a teaspoon soda is a homemade baking powder, the standard leavening before commercial tins were trusted. Roughly 1.5 teaspoons of double-acting baking powder does the same job; sift whichever you use with the flour rather than adding it last.
- One tablespoon of butterThat is not a misprint but it is very lean by modern standards, closer to a sponge than a butter cake. There is not enough fat to cream with the sugar, so beat the eggs and sugar until thick and pale, then work in the softened butter and milk.
- The batter will be stiffTwo cups of flour against half a cup of milk and two eggs gives a heavy batter that will not pour. Spread it into the tins with an offset spatula; if it fights you, an extra tablespoon or two of milk is within the spirit of the recipe.
- Oven and timeBake at 350F. Layers this thin are done in 12 to 18 minutes — check at 12, since a lean batter dries out quickly once it colours.
- FlourHousehold flour of the period was often softer than modern all-purpose, though this varied. Substituting cake flour for a quarter of the total, or removing two tablespoons per cup and replacing them with cornstarch, gives a closer crumb.
- YieldThree thin layers, filled and stacked, cut into 8 to 10 slices.
Through the second half of the nineteenth century, "chocolate cake" in American household books very often meant an ordinary white or cup cake baked in jelly tins and layered with a chocolate filling; chocolate worked into the batter itself only became the default later, as blocks of unsweetened chocolate and then cocoa powder grew cheap and reliable. The cream of tartar and soda pairing places this squarely in the era before commercial baking powder was universally trusted wo components themselves, in a rough two-to-one ratio that was the conventional guidance of the day.