Leonie's Cake
One cupful sugar, one cupful flour dried in the oven and sifted, one cupful nice fresh milk, three eggs, whites and yolks. Put everything together in a bowl and beat it thoroughly. Put it in one or two well-buttered pie plates, according to the thickness you wish to make your cakes. Sprinkle a little flour over your buttered pie plates before putting in your cake. Bake in the oven. If you wish to make a chocolate cake, make your cake (by the above receipt) an inch and a half thick, slice it in half, butter it with apricot paste or jam, then put on top a nice layer of chocolate cream, as follows: Take three tablets of Maillard's best chocolate. Boil a cupful of milk and let the chocolate dissolve in it, stirring it over a slow fire for a quarter of an hour. Then spread on top of your cake while hot.
A light milk cake — no butter, just eggs, sugar, flour, and milk — that transforms into a filled chocolate layer cake with a cooked chocolate cream.
- Dry the flour?“Flour dried in the oven” was insurance against damp flour; modern flour needs no drying, so you can skip that step.
- A lean batterWith milk and eggs but no butter, this bakes light and slightly spongy — build it an inch and a half thick for the chocolate version.
- “Three tablets of chocolate”Old eating-chocolate came in small tablets of about an ounce; use roughly 3 oz of good semisweet or bittersweet chocolate.
- The chocolate creamMelting chocolate into a cup of milk over low heat for 15 minutes makes a simple, pourable glaze — stir constantly so it doesn’t scorch.
- Fill and finishSplit the cake, spread with apricot jam, and pour the warm chocolate cream over the top.
The recipe’s call for “Maillard’s best chocolate” names a real luxury of the age. Henri Maillard was a French-born confectioner whose celebrated New York establishment made him one of nineteenth-century America’s most fashionable names in chocolate and bonbons, his wares a fixture of fine tables and elegant weddings. That a New Orleans home cook reached for Maillard’s by name says something about the era’s pantry: good chocolate was an imported indulgence, ordered from famous houses and worth specifying. Any fine dark chocolate stands in for it today.
From page 66 of the 1904 edition.
Original pages from the book
