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Chocolate Marble Cake
½ cup butter 1 cup sugar ½ cup sweet milk 1½ cups Five Roses flour 1 teaspoon cream of tartar 4 eggs (whites only).
Take 1 cup of the above mixture, and add to it 5 tablespoons powdered chocolate. Wet with 2 tablespoons milk and flavour with vanilla. Put a layer of white and then of dark batter in baking pan. Bake in hot oven. Ice with chocolate icing.
A white butter cake with a cup of the batter darkened and layered in for the marbling. The instructions assume a cook who already knows how a creamed cake goes together, and they leave out one thing the batter cannot do without.
- The leavening is incompleteCream of tartar is an acid; on its own it raises nothing, and no soda is listed, whether through an omission in the printing or because the reader was expected to supply it. Add ½ teaspoon baking soda sifted with the flour, or drop the cream of tartar and use 2 teaspoons baking powder instead.
- "Hot oven"In books of this period a hot oven is generally reckoned at about 400F or hotter, which is fiercer than a butter cake with four whites in it wants. Bake at 350F, 35-45 minutes for a loaf or 8-inch square pan, until a skewer comes out clean.
- Sweet milkSimply fresh unsoured whole milk, as opposed to the buttermilk or sour milk called for elsewhere in the book. No substitution needed.
- Powdered chocolateMost likely cocoa powder rather than a sweetened drinking mixture, though period usage of the term is not consistent. Five tablespoons in a single cup of batter is a great deal of dry, bitter powder: whisk it with a tablespoon of sugar and the two tablespoons of milk into a smooth paste before folding it in, or the dark layer will taste harsh and bake dry.
- Whites onlyBeat the four whites to soft peaks and fold them in last, after the flour. If they are simply stirred in the cake loses the fine, pale crumb that is the whole point of a white batter beside a dark one.
- Layering, not swirlingThe recipe means alternating spoonfuls or bands of the two batters. For a marbled rather than striped cut, draw a knife once through the pan in an S; more than that and the two colours muddy into uniform tan.
- FlourFive Roses was a hard-wheat Manitoba flour, stronger than modern all-purpose. Measure the 1½ cups by spooning and levelling, and for a tenderer crumb replace 2 tablespoons of it with cornstarch.
- YieldAn 8-inch square or a single deep 8-inch round, serving 8 to 10. The chocolate icing is not specified; any cooked or butter icing made with cocoa will suit.
The Five Roses Cook Book was published by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company of Montreal and given away or sold cheaply to promote Five Roses flour, milled from Manitoba hard wheat; the early editions circulated in enormous numbers through Canadian farm and small-town kitchens in the 1910s and 1920s, which is why so many recipes in it name the brand in the ingredient list. Marble cake belongs to the North American cake repertoire of the later nineteenth century, when it was usually made by combining a light batter with a dark one spiced with molasses, cinnamon and cloves; the chocolate version, like this one, became common only after cocoa powder was cheap and reliably available in tins. The instruction to use whites only reflects the same period's fondness for contrast: a genuinely white batter beside a genuinely dark one, with the leftover yolks presumably going into a gold cake or a custard rather than being wasted.