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Devil Cake
CUSTARD 1 cup grated chocolate ½ cup sweet milk 1 cup brown sugar 1 egg (yolk only) 1 teaspoon vanilla Stir in saucepan, cook and cool 1 cup brown sugar ½ cup butter
This is a devil's food cake built the old way: a cooked chocolate custard stirred into a creamed butter-and-sugar batter. Note before you start that the text as printed breaks off — the flour, liquid, leavening and baking directions are missing.
- The page is incompleteWhat survives is the custard (chocolate, milk, brown sugar, yolk, vanilla) and the beginning of the batter (a second cup of brown sugar, half a cup of butter). Flour quantity, the soda or baking powder, the remaining eggs and the bake are not given, so this cannot be followed straight through; use it alongside a complete devil's food recipe.
- Grated chocolateThis meant a hard cake of unsweetened baking chocolate grated on a box grater, not cocoa powder and not chips. A cup lightly packed is perhaps 3 to 4 oz; chopped fine or coarsely grated behaves much the same once melted into the milk.
- Sweet milkPlain fresh whole milk, specified to distinguish it from the sour milk or buttermilk that many devil's food recipes of the period called for in the batter itself. Sour milk paired with baking soda supplied the leavening.
- Cooking the custardThe text says only 'stir in saucepan, cook and cool.' Warm the chocolate, milk, sugar and yolk together over low heat, stirring constantly, until it thickens. A hard boil scrambles the yolk. Cool it before it meets the creamed butter, or the batter will break.
- Brown sugarTwo cups in total, one in the custard and one in the batter. Period brown sugar was probably closer to today's light brown; dark brown will give a heavier molasses note.
- OvenThe text gives no oven direction. For a cake of this type, 350F is the usual modern equivalent; two 8-inch layers would take roughly 25 to 30 minutes, a single deep pan closer to 40.
The Five Roses Cook Book was issued by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company of Montreal to promote its Five Roses flour, and it collected recipes sent in by home cooks across Canada — which helps explain why entries such as this one arrive abbreviated. Devil's food cake was still a fairly new arrival at the time: printed recipes for it are generally placed around the turn of the century, its name generally understood as the dark, rich counterpart to the pale, airy angel food cake that preceded it. The cooked-custard method here, melting grated chocolate with milk, sugar and a yolk before folding it into the batter, was one way of getting deep colour and a moist crumb out of unsweetened block chocolate.