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Chocolate Cake
One heaping tablespoon of butter, one cup of granulated sugar, yolks of three eggs, whites of four eggs, one teaspoon of cream tartar, one-half teaspoon of soda, one pinch of salt, one-half teaspoon of vanilla extract, one and one-half cups of flour, one-half cup of milk.
Filling: One-fourth cake of chocolate, two tablespoons of water and one heaping cup of powdered sugar. Mrs Dan R. Hanna.
This is a recipe in the older shorthand: an ingredient list with no method, no pan size and no oven temperature, on the assumption that any cook knew what to do with butter, sugar and separated eggs. Here is what the list implies.
- Method, since none is givenCream the butter with the sugar, beat in the yolks, then add the sifted flour, cream of tartar, soda and salt alternately with the milk, and fold in the stiffly beaten whites and vanilla last. The extra white (four whites to three yolks) is what keeps the crumb light.
- Cream of tartar and sodaTogether these are homemade baking powder. One-half teaspoon soda with one teaspoon cream of tartar is roughly equivalent to two teaspoons of modern double-acting baking powder, but the tartar acts on contact with liquid, so get the batter into the pans and into the oven without delay.
- One-fourth cake of chocolateBaking chocolate was sold in 8-ounce cakes scored into squares, so a quarter cake is about 2 ounces of unsweetened chocolate. Two squares of modern unsweetened baking chocolate is the intended amount.
- The filling is an uncooked icingMelt the chocolate with the water, then beat in the powdered sugar. Two tablespoons of water for a heaping cup of sugar gives a very stiff paste; add water a teaspoon at a time until it spreads. This is a filling for between layers rather than a poured glaze.
- Pan and ovenThe quantities suit two 8-inch layers or one 8-inch square. Bake at 350F, 20 to 25 minutes for layers, until the centre springs back.
- A heaping tablespoon of butterRead this as a generous tablespoon, about 3/4 ounce. It is a lean cake by modern standards, closer to a hot-milk cake than to a butter layer cake, and it is unlikely to keep well for long.
- YieldTwo thin layers, cutting into eight to ten servings.
The title tells you something about how the phrase "chocolate cake" was used around the turn of the twentieth century: the batter here contains no chocolate at all. The cake is a plain white-and-yellow layer, and the chocolate arrives only as the filling between the layers, an arrangement often said to have been common before cooks began working the chocolate into the crumb itself. The recipe relies on cream of tartar and soda rather than tinned baking powder. The attribution is also telling: this one was contributed by name, in the manner of a subscription or community cookbook, and if the book is indeed a Cleveland one, the Hanna name was a prominent one in that city's industrial and newspaper circles in this period. Recipes gathered this way were written cook-to-cook, which is why the instructions are simply absent "" the compiler assumed her readers had made a layer cake many times before.