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Chocolate Marble Cake
1/2 cup butter, 1 cup sugar, 1/2 cup milk, 1 1/2 cups flour, 1 tablespoon flour, Whites 4 eggs, 1 teaspoon vanilla, 2 1/2 teaspoons baking powder, 1 square Walter Baker & Co.'s Premium No. 1 Chocolate, 1/2 teaspoon salt. Cream butter and add sugar gradually; then add milk alternately with flour mixed and sifted with two teaspoons baking powder, and salt, whites of eggs beaten until stiff and dry, and vanilla. To one-third of the mixture add melted chocolate and reserved baking powder, mixed and sifted with remaining flour. Butter a deep cake or angel cake pan, put in mixtures by spoonfuls, and bake in a moderate oven fifty minutes.
A white butter cake, one-third of which is darkened with unsweetened chocolate and dropped in alongside the plain batter. The method is standard for its date; only a few details need translating.
- A moderate ovenBake at 350F. Fifty minutes suits a deep tube pan; start testing at 40 minutes if you use two 8-inch layers instead.
- The chocolate squareWalter Baker's Premium No. 1 was unsweetened baking chocolate, one ounce to the square. Any 1 oz unsweetened chocolate works; melt it and let it cool to barely warm so it does not deflate the whites.
- The two flour and baking powder amountsThe extra tablespoon of flour and the reserved half teaspoon of baking powder are not errors. The recipe deliberately holds them back for the chocolate third, sifted together with the melted chocolate portion; the likely purpose is to offset the melted chocolate stirred into that third.
- Egg whites "stiff and dry"Period phrasing for what we would now call firm peaks. Taken literally to the dry, grainy stage the whites break down and fold in as lumps; stop while they still look glossy.
- Folding orderThe whites go in near the end, after the milk and flour. Fold rather than beat, then divide off the third that will take the chocolate and fold that in with as few strokes as possible.
- The panThe recipe allows either a deep cake pan or an angel cake (tube) pan; tube pans of the period commonly ran about 9 to 10 inches. Butter it well; there is no parchment in this method and the marbled crumb tears easily.
- MarblingThe recipe says only to put the mixtures in by spoonfuls. If you want a defined marble, alternate light and dark and draw a knife through once or twice; more than that and you get a uniformly beige cake.
- YieldOne tube cake, 10 to 12 slices. It keeps two or three days wrapped and takes a plain vanilla or chocolate glaze well.
Walter Baker & Co. of Dorchester, Massachusetts, was among the oldest chocolate firms in the United States, and its Choice Recipes booklets were straightforward advertising: the recipes name the company's Premium No. 1 chocolate or its breakfast cocoa by brand. The booklets drew on the Boston cooking-school tradition, and editions credit Maria Parloa and other school-trained writers, which is why the instructions read in the clipped, measured style of Fannie Farmer's generation rather than the vaguer household books of the 1870s. Marble cake itself is older than the chocolate version; earlier American recipes marbled a white batter with a dark one colored by molasses and spices, and the switch to chocolate followed the drop in price and improvement in quality of eating and baking chocolate through the late nineteenth century. A cake calling for four egg whites and chemical leavening also marks the period: cheap, reliable baking powder had made the older reliance on beaten whole eggs and long creaming optional.