Chocolate Cake
1/2 cup butter 1 cup sugar 3 eggs 1/2 cup milk 1 1/3 cups Gold Medal flour 3 teaspoons baking powder 2 oz. Baker's chocolate 1 teaspoon vanilla Cream the butter, add the sugar, add the beaten egg yolks; sift flour and baking powder and alternate with the milk; melt the chocolate over the tea kettle and stir into the cake before the whites of eggs, add vanilla and fold in the egg whites beaten very stiff. Bake in shallow, square cake tin and frost with fondant. When the frosting is cold spread with melted unsweetened chocolate, or mix to a stiff paste 3 tablespoons of cream, powdered sugar; add flavoring and a square of melted chocolate and spread.
A straightforward creamed butter cake with the chocolate stirred in at the end. The only real difficulties are the leavening, which is heavy by current standards, and the complete absence of oven temperature or baking time.
- Oven and timeNo temperature or baking time is given; ovens of this period were judged without a thermometer. As a modern reconstruction, bake at 350F; a shallow 8-inch square tin will take roughly 25 to 30 minutes, until the centre springs back.
- Baker's chocolateUnsweetened baking chocolate, sold in 1-ounce squares by Walter Baker & Co. Two ounces of any modern unsweetened bar works; the later instruction for "a square of melted chocolate" in the frosting means one ounce.
- Melt it over the tea kettleThe kettle was the improvised double boiler. Use a bowl over barely simmering water, or short bursts in a microwave. Keep water out of it, which is what makes chocolate seize, and keep the heat gentle, since overheated chocolate scorches and turns grainy.
- Baking powderThree teaspoons to 1 1/3 cups of flour is roughly double the modern proportion, probably reflecting the weaker powders then in use. At that rate a modern double-acting powder is likely to give a coarse crumb and can leave a faintly metallic edge; 1 1/2 to 2 teaspoons is closer to the lift the recipe seems to want.
- Order of operationsThe chocolate goes in before the whites for a reason. Warm chocolate folded into stiff whites deflates them; get it into the batter first, then fold.
- Beating the whitesWhites at this date were beaten by hand, with a whisk or a rotary beater. With a stand mixer, stop at firm peaks that still bend at the tip rather than beating to a dry foam.
- Fondant frostingPoured fondant, not the rolled sugar paste sold today. If you are not making fondant, the recipe's own alternative is cream and powdered sugar worked to a stiff paste with flavouring and a square of melted chocolate, thickened to spreading consistency by feel.
- YieldOne shallow 8-inch square, about nine to twelve pieces.
This comes from one of the flour-brand cook books that Washburn-Crosby and its competitors distributed in enormous numbers around the turn of the twentieth century, which is why the flour is specified by name and nothing else is. Books of this kind were advertising that had to be genuinely useful, so they collected reliable domestic staples: a plain chocolate butter cake sat comfortably beside layer cakes, cookies and biscuit. The chocolate, too, is named as a brand. Walter Baker & Co. of Dorchester, Massachusetts, generally traced to a chocolate mill established in the 1760s, was dominant enough that "Baker's chocolate" was read simply as unsweetened chocolate, and "a square" as a standard ounce. Chocolate cakes proper are a nineteenth-century development; before industrial milling and falling prices, chocolate in American cookery was overwhelmingly a drink.