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Chocolate Cake
Ingredients.
Half a pound of grated Chocolate.
Quarter of a pound of Flour. * To make Prepared Flour: four pounds of Vienna Flour, two ounces of Cream of Tartar, one ounce of Carbonate of Soda-well mixed together.
Half a pound of Butter.
Two ounces of ground Rice.
Six ounces of White Sugar.
One teaspoonful of Baking-powder.
This is a formula rather than a method: the book gives quantities and leaves the mixing, the tin and the oven to the cook's judgement. A few of the ingredients need translating before it can be worked at all.
- No eggs, no liquidAs printed, the list gives fat, sugar, flour, rice and chocolate but nothing to bind or moisten them. Eggs and liquid are missing; whether that is a slip in the printing or an entry that assumed a method already known to the reader cannot be told from the page. Treat it as an ingredient note to be read alongside a full creamed-cake method.
- Prepared flourThe starred note describes a homemade self-raising flour: four pounds of Vienna flour to two ounces cream of tartar and one ounce carbonate of soda. Modern self-raising flour is a reasonable substitute for the quarter pound called for.
- Vienna flourA fine, very white flour of the high-milling process associated with Viennese and Hungarian mills, sold in Britain in the later nineteenth century. Ordinary plain white flour is the working equivalent; there is no need to seek out anything special.
- Double leaveningThe prepared flour already carries cream of tartar and soda, and the recipe then adds a teaspoonful of baking powder on top. Whether that doubling is intended cannot be told from the page; if you use plain flour plus baking powder, do not also add the extra spoonful.
- Grated chocolateHalf a pound of block chocolate, grated to a powder so it disperses through the batter. Block chocolate of this period was generally less sweet than modern eating chocolate; a dark chocolate of about 60-70 per cent is a reasonable match, and a sweet eating chocolate will make the cake cloying against only six ounces of sugar.
- Ground riceFinely milled rice, close to what is sold today as rice flour, though ground rice is a little coarser. Two ounces alongside four of wheat flour shortens the crumb and gives a close, slightly sandy texture.
- WeightsHalf a pound is 225 g, quarter of a pound 115 g, six ounces 170 g, two ounces 55 g. The proportions are unusually rich: the fat and chocolate together outweigh the flour more than three to one.
- Oven and tinThe recipe gives neither oven nor tin. As a modern working suggestion, bake in a moderate oven, about 350F/175C, in a greased and lined 8-inch round tin; a cake this dense and buttery is likely to want 45 minutes to an hour, and is best tested with a skewer rather than by time.
Chocolate arrived in the British cake tin comparatively late. For most of the nineteenth century it was a drink, and the grated block chocolate that flavours cakes like this one is the same material that would otherwise have gone into a pot of chocolate at breakfast; only after the industrial pressing of cocoa butter from the bean did cheap cocoa powder become the usual baking form. The telegraphic quality of the entry suggests a reader who wanted the proportions and nothing else. The footnote on prepared flour is the more revealing detail: commercial self-raising flour existed by this date, but some kitchens still mixed their own from cream of tartar and carbonate of soda in bulk.