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Chocolate Cake, or Devil's Food
5 level tablespoonfuls of butter, 1 1/4 cups of sugar, 3 1/2 squares of Baker's Premium No. 1 Chocolate, melted, 1 teaspoonful of vanilla, 3/4 a cup of milk, 3 1/2 level teaspoonfuls of baking powder, 3 eggs, 1 1/2 cups of sifted pastry flour.
Cream the butter, add sugar and chocolate, then the unbeaten eggs and vanilla, and beat together until very smooth. Sift the baking powder with one-half a cup of the flour, and use first; then alternate the milk and the remaining flour, and make the mixture stiff enough to drop from the spoon. Beat until very smooth and bake in loaf in moderate oven.
A plain butter-and-chocolate loaf from a Walter Baker & Co. promotional booklet, written when "Premium No. 1" needed no explanation. A few substitutions and one number make it work now.
- The chocolateBaker's Premium No. 1 was unsweetened chocolate sold in 1-ounce squares, so 3 1/2 squares is 3 1/2 oz of unsweetened baking chocolate. Melt it and let it cool to barely warm before it goes in, or it will loosen the creamed butter.
- Butter measure5 level tablespoons is about 2 1/2 oz, roughly 70 g — less than a modern cake of this size would use, which is likely why the crumb comes out firm and close rather than plush.
- Baking powder3 1/2 level teaspoons for 1 1/2 cups of flour is roughly double current practice. Early-1900s powders were single-acting and varied in strength, but with today's product this quantity is likely to give a soapy edge and a cake that rises fast and sinks; 1 1/2 to 2 teaspoons is the sensible range.
- Pastry flourSifted pastry flour is lower in protein than all-purpose. Substitute cake flour, or use all-purpose with 2 tablespoons per cup replaced by cornstarch, and sift as directed — the recipe assumes sifted-then-measured volume.
- Unbeaten eggsThe eggs go in whole and unwhipped, so add them one at a time and beat well between; dumping all three at once into a small quantity of creamed butter will break the emulsion.
- "Stiff enough to drop from the spoon"This is the hinge. Hold back a little of the milk if needed — the batter should fall from a spoon in a heavy lump, not pour. Too slack and this low-fat, high-leavening batter collapses in the middle.
- Moderate oven350F. Bake in a greased 9x5-inch loaf pan for about 45 to 55 minutes, until a skewer comes out clean and the top springs back.
- YieldOne loaf, ten to twelve slices. The recipe gives no finishing instruction; served plain or iced as you like, and unfrosted it keeps a couple of days wrapped.
This comes from one of the recipe booklets issued by Walter Baker & Co. of Dorchester, Massachusetts — a chocolate house generally traced to 1765 and among the oldest food companies in the United States — which spent the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries distributing free pamphlets whose recipes typically specified its own branded squares and cocoa. The booklets carried recipes credited to a group of cookery teachers, among them Maria Parloa, Mary Lincoln, Sarah Tyson Rorer, Janet McKenzie Hill, and Fannie Merritt Farmer. The name devil's food appears in American cookbooks around the turn of the twentieth century, generally understood as the dark counterpart to the pale, fat-free angel food cake then fashionable; the deep reddish tinge later associated with the name came from recipes leavened with baking soda reacting with acidic natural cocoa, which is why this baking-powder version reads simply as a chocolate loaf.