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Cocoa Cake
1 cup sweet milk 2 tablespoons cocoa 1 egg 1 cup white sugar ½ cup butter ½ cup sweet milk 1 teaspoon soda 2 cups Five Roses flour Vanilla Boil ½ cup milk and cocoa till thick.
When done, stir in the egg. When cold, add white sugar, butter and other half cup of milk, also soda dissolved in warm water. Add flour and flavoring. Bake in long pan.
A one-egg chocolate cake built on a cooked cocoa paste rather than creamed butter and melted chocolate. The method is unusual by modern habit but sound, provided the leavening is handled sensibly.
- The ingredient list double-counts the milkThe ingredient list gives more milk than the method uses -- 1 cup at the head and a further ½ cup below, 1½ cups in all -- while the method calls for only two half-cups: half boiled with the cocoa, half stirred in later. One cup total is what the cake needs.
- Sweet milkSimply fresh, unsoured whole milk, as opposed to the buttermilk or clabbered milk a period kitchen also kept on hand. The distinction mattered then because it determined whether soda alone would work.
- Soda with nothing acidic to react withThis is the hinge. A teaspoon of soda against sweet milk, sweet butter and natural cocoa leaves very little acid to neutralise it, and the cake can taste soapy with a brownish, coarse crumb. Natural (non-alkalised) cocoa supplies some acidity; Dutch-process cocoa supplies almost none and should not be used here. Half a teaspoon of soda plus a teaspoon of cream of tartar, or swapping the second half cup of milk for buttermilk, brings it into balance.
- The cocoa pasteTwo tablespoons of cocoa boiled into half a cup of milk thickens in two or three minutes over low heat, with constant stirring; it will look like a loose pudding. Cocoa scorches readily, so keep the heat modest.
- Adding the eggStir a spoonful of the hot paste into the beaten egg first, then return it to the pan off the heat. Dropped straight into a boiling mixture the egg will set in threads.
- ButterThe butter goes in cold, into a cold cocoa mixture, which does not incorporate well. Have it soft, and beat it with the sugar and cocoa paste until smooth before the flour goes in.
- Flour and flavouringFive Roses was a Canadian hard-wheat flour; ordinary all-purpose is the usual modern stand-in, though the original was somewhat stronger. Two cups is roughly 250 g spooned and levelled, nearer 280 g if scooped. Vanilla is unquantified: a teaspoon.
- Long pan and oven"Long pan" is not defined in the recipe; it is generally taken as a shallow rectangular tin, and a 9 by 13 will give a thin sheet from this quantity of batter. No temperature is given: bake at 350F for 25 to 30 minutes, until the centre springs back. In an 8-inch square pan allow 35 to 40 minutes.
- YieldAbout 12 to 16 squares from the long pan. It is a plain everyday cake, meant to be cut in the tin and eaten with a boiled icing or nothing at all.
The Five Roses Cook Book was issued by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company of Montreal and Winnipeg, distributed to purchasers of Five Roses flour, and its recipes were largely gathered from Canadian housewives who used the brand. Cocoa cakes of this type spread widely in North America once defatted cocoa powder became a cheap grocery staple in the later nineteenth century; before that, chocolate came as a hard cake to be grated, and it was expensive enough that a plain family cake rarely contained it. Cooking the cocoa with milk into a thick paste, rather than folding dry powder into the batter, appears in a number of period recipes and does real work: it hydrates the starch and disperses the cocoa solids evenly, which matters when there are only two tablespoons to colour and flavour an entire pan. The single egg and half cup of butter mark this as an economical cake, the sort baked on a weekday rather than for company.