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Chocolate Marble Cake
Two cups of sugar, one cup of butter, four eggs, two teaspoons of baking powder, one cup of milk, one teaspoon of vanilla. Divide batter in two parts; add to one part two tablespoons of grated chocolate, and half a teaspoon of cloves.
— Mrs. Philip H. Cole
A typical village contribution: the flour is left out entirely, on the assumption that any woman reading it knew what a butter cake wanted. A few other details need translating.
- The missing flourNo flour is listed. A creamed batter on this scale — 2 cups sugar, 1 cup butter, 4 eggs, 1 cup milk — conventionally takes about 3 to 3 1/2 cups of soft wheat flour. Any figure is an inference, not the writer's, so treat the first attempt as a test bake.
- Baking powder proportionTwo teaspoons for roughly three cups of flour is on the light side by modern standards, but the four eggs are doing much of the lifting. Cream the butter and sugar until genuinely pale and add the eggs one at a time.
- Grated chocolateThis means a hard unsweetened cake chocolate grated on a box grater, not chips and not cocoa powder. Two tablespoons of grated unsweetened chocolate is roughly half to one ounce — a modest amount that colors and flavors the dark half without making it a chocolate cake. Melting it first and stirring it in warm works better than grating.
- The clovesHalf a teaspoon of cloves against the vanilla is assertive, and it looks deliberate: spice often accompanied chocolate in nineteenth-century American baking. Reduce to a quarter teaspoon if you want the chocolate forward.
- MarblingSpoon the two batters into the pan in alternating dollops and draw a knife through once or twice in a figure eight. More than that and you get a uniform brown rather than a marble.
- Pan and ovenThis quantity fills a 10-inch tube pan or two generous 9-inch layers. The recipe gives no oven instruction; 350F is a reasonable modern working temperature — a tube pan will want 50 to 60 minutes, layers 25 to 30.
- YieldRoughly 12 to 16 servings. It keeps well wrapped for several days, as butter cakes of this richness are meant to.
Marble cake was a fixture of American community cookbooks from the middle of the nineteenth century onward, and many early versions were not chocolate at all — the dark batter was colored with molasses and spices, which may be why cloves appear here alongside the chocolate. Grated chocolate became a common darkening agent as solid baking chocolate grew more widely available in the second half of the century. The recipe's form is typical of the genre: a bare list of proportions signed with a contributor's married name, printed for neighbors who already knew how much flour such a batter took and needed only the distinguishing details. Such books were often compiled to raise money for a church, library or relief society, and the omission of the obvious suggests a local audience.