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Marbled Chocolate Cake
Make a batter as for white cake, take out one tea-cup, add to it five table-spoons of grated chocolate, moisten with milk, and flavor with vanilla; pour a layer of the white batter into the baking-pan, then drop the chocolate batter with a spoon in spots, and spread the remainder of the white batter over it. -Mrs. Sarah Phelps, Springfield, Ohio.
This is a variation instruction rather than a full recipe: it assumes you already have a white cake batter mixed and a hot oven waiting. Everything hinges on getting the two batters to the same consistency before they meet in the pan.
- The white cake it depends onBuckeye Cookery expects you to turn back to one of its white cake formulas, which are butter cakes raised with beaten egg whites and, depending on the recipe, cream of tartar and soda or baking powder. Any modern white or 1-2-3-4 style butter cake batter will serve; the borrowed tea-cup is usually reckoned at about 3/4 cup.
- Grated chocolate is not cocoa powderIn 1877 this means a hard cake of chocolate grated on a rasp, most likely unsweetened baking chocolate. Five tablespoons works out to roughly 1 to 1 1/2 oz. Substituting cocoa powder gives a drier, more absorbent batter and needs extra fat and sugar to compensate.
- "Moisten with milk" means barelyA tablespoon or two, no more. Add just enough that the chocolate portion falls from the spoon at the same speed as the white batter. If the dark batter is looser, it sinks and you get layers instead of marbling.
- Marbling techniqueDropping spoonfuls and covering them, as written, produces a cake with a dark seam through the middle. For visible marbling, drag a knife or skewer once through the pan in an S shape, no more than two or three passes. Over-swirling turns the whole crumb an even brown.
- Oven temperatureThe recipe gives none; 350F suits a butter cake of this kind. Period books of this sort generally offered rule-of-thumb oven tests rather than numbers, which are unnecessary with a modern oven.
- Pan and timingThe original gives neither, and the amount depends on which white cake you start from. A batter of this type will generally take one 9-inch square or two 8-inch rounds, baking 30-40 minutes; in a loaf or tube pan allow 50-60 minutes. It is done when the centre springs back and a skewer comes out clean.
- YieldDepending on the white cake used, about 10 to 12 servings from a single 9-inch cake.
Marble cake appears in American cookbooks from the mid-nineteenth century onward, and the earliest versions are not chocolate at all: the dark batter was coloured and flavoured with molasses, brown sugar and spices. Chocolate marble cakes like this one came later, and the shift is often explained by the growth of domestic chocolate manufacture after the Civil War, though that remains inference rather than documented cause. Buckeye Cookery and Practical Housekeeping, compiled from contributions by Ohio housewives and first published in 1877, is full of recipes credited to named women in named towns, and the brevity here is typical of that collective authorship - Mrs. Phelps assumed her readers already knew how to make a white cake and only needed telling what to do differently.