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Chocolate Cake
1/2 cup butter, 3/4 cup sugar, 1/2 cup milk, 1/2 teaspoon vanilla, 3 eggs, 3 ounces Walter Baker & Co.'s Premium No. 1 Chocolate, 1 3/4 cups bread flour, 3 teaspoons baking powder.
Cream butter, add gradually sugar, milk, vanilla, eggs well beaten, chocolate melted, and flour mixed and sifted with baking powder. Turn into buttered shallow cake pans and bake from thirty to thirty-five minutes in a moderate oven.
A plain butter cake from a chocolate-company booklet, written when "chocolate" on a shelf meant an unsweetened block. A few substitutions and one adjustment to the mixing order are all it needs.
- Premium No. 1 ChocolateWalter Baker's plain unsweetened baking chocolate, generally reckoned in one-ounce squares. Use 3 oz of plain unsweetened baking chocolate, melted and cooled slightly; do not substitute semisweet, or the sugar balance shifts considerably.
- A moderate ovenTake this as about 350F. Shallow layers may be done before the end of the stated time, so begin testing at around 25 minutes.
- Bread flourIn period usage this meant hard spring-wheat flour, as distinct from pastry flour. All-purpose flour, spooned and levelled, is the usual modern substitute here and gives a tender crumb.
- Mixing orderAs written, the milk goes into the creamed butter before the eggs and flour, and the mixture may look separated at that point. If you prefer a smoother batter: cream butter and sugar, beat in the eggs, then the melted chocolate and vanilla, then alternate the flour sifted with the baking powder with the milk.
- Baking powderThree teaspoons for 1 3/4 cups of flour is generous by current standards. Two teaspoons of modern double-acting powder gives plenty of lift without an off aftertaste.
- SweetnessThree-quarters of a cup of sugar against 3 oz of unsweetened chocolate makes a cake much less sweet than a modern one. Cakes of this kind were finished with a sweet boiled or confectioners' frosting.
- Pans and yield"shallow cake pans" is not specified further; two round layer tins of roughly 8 to 9 inches will suit this quantity of batter, giving eight to ten servings once filled and frosted.
Walter Baker & Co. milled chocolate on the Neponset River at Dorchester, Massachusetts, a business generally traced to the partnership of Dr. James Baker and the Irish chocolate-maker John Hannon in 1765 and among the oldest in the American trade. Choice Recipes was one of a long series of promotional booklets the firm issued around the turn of the twentieth century, with contributions credited to well-known cooking-school figures of the day — Maria Parloa, Fannie Merritt Farmer and Janet McKenzie Hill among them — whose names lent authority to the product. The recipes are written in the level-measurement style those schools had recently standardised, and nearly every one names a specific Baker product, here Premium No. 1, the plain unsweetened cake chocolate that was the company's staple. Layer cakes of this kind spread quickly in American homes once chemical leavening became reliable and cheap, and a chocolate version signalled that the household could afford an ingredient still treated, a generation earlier, mainly as a drink.