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Chocolate Cake (One cup butter two of sugar)
One cup butter, two of sugar, one of milk, five eggs, leaving out the whites of three, four cups sifted flour, two tea-spoons bakingpowder, or one small tea-spoon soda and two of cream tartar in the flour; bake in three layers in deep jelly-tins. For icing, take whites of three eggs, beaten stiff, one and a half cups powdered sugar, six table-spoons grated chocolate, two tea-spoons vanilla. - Mrs. J. H. Shearer.
The cake itself is a straightforward creamed butter cake from the era when jelly-tins and chemical leaveners had just made layer cakes practical. The icing is the problem: it is uncooked beaten egg white, never heated at any point, and a current recipe should be used in its place.
- Why the icing is flaggedWhites, sugar, grated chocolate and vanilla beaten together and spread on a cooled cake are never brought anywhere near a temperature that would kill Salmonella. Eggs in 1877 were more often local and very fresh; a supermarket shell egg is a different proposition, and the risk falls hardest on children, pregnant women and anyone immunocompromised. Use a modern cooked or pasteurized-egg frosting recipe.
- The eggs in the batter"Five eggs, leaving out the whites of three" means two whole eggs plus three yolks. The three reserved whites are exactly what the original icing calls for, which is the point of the arrangement.
- Cup of butterA cup of butter is 8 oz, 225 g, two American sticks. Have it properly softened; this is a creaming-method batter and cold butter will not take the sugar.
- Flour measureFour cups of flour sifted before measuring is roughly 420 to 460 g. Flour of the period varied a good deal from modern all-purpose, so mix only until the flour disappears.
- LeaveningTwo teaspoons baking powder is modest for this much flour by today's standards; the five eggs do part of the lifting. Modern powder is more reliable than the 1877 article. The alternative given wo of of cream of tartar - is the same chemistry unmixed, and works if you sift it thoroughly through the flour.
- Grated chocolateThis means solid unsweetened block chocolate grated fine, not cocoa powder. Six tablespoons grated is about 1.5 oz / 40 g.
- Tins and oven"Deep jelly-tins" are round layer pans, 8 or 9 inches across and about 1.5 inches deep. The recipe gives no oven direction of any kind; Buckeye Cookery assumes a wood range. In a modern oven, 350F for 25 to 30 minutes suits 9-inch layers.
- YieldThree layers of this size cut into 12 to 16 slices.
Buckeye Cookery and Practical Housekeeping, first published in 1877 and built from contributions by Ohio housewives — the book grew out of the Marysville, Ohio, Buckeye Cookbook, and the Minneapolis connection is one of publication and editorship rather than of contributors; hence the string of names like Mrs. J. H. Shearer attached to individual receipts — arrived just as the American layer cake was becoming a standard domestic accomplishment. Two things made it possible: dependable chemical leavening, which let a heavy butter batter rise without hours of hand-beaten eggs, and cheap stamped tinware, the shallow "jelly-tin" that gave a thin round layer quickly. Chocolate here is still a flavoring for the icing rather than the crumb; recipes for cake with chocolate worked into the batter itself become common only later. Cakes of this period were routinely finished with a raw-white icing beaten with powdered sugar, a practice that persisted in print well into the twentieth century and has since been retired for good reason.