Cake: Chocolate
Chocolate Cake. 1/4 cupful sugar, cupful butter, 2 eggs, cupful milk, 1½ cupfuls flour, 2½ teaspoonfuls Calumet baking powder, 2 squares Runkel's Chocolate, teaspoonful McIlhenny's Mexican Vanilla, Dash salt.
Beat the butter and sugar together to a cream, add the yolks of eggs which have been well beaten, then the milk, the flour sifted with the baking powder and salt. Beat till light and frothy, add the vanilla and melted chocolate, last the whites of eggs whipped stiff. Bake in a long narrow pan, and when cool, cover with a white frosting.
Chocolate Layer Cake. cupfuls sugar, 2 tablespoonfuls butter, 1 egg, ½ cupful milk, 1 cupfuls flour, 2 teaspoonfuls Calumet baking powder, Dash salt, teaspoonful McIlhenny's Mexican Vanilla.
Cream the butter and sugar together, add the egg beaten to a froth, then the milk, flour sifted with baking powder, and vanilla. Bake in one deep layer cake tin; when the cake is cool, split in two shortcake fashion, and cover the smooth top of each layer with a chocolate frosting.
Cocoa Sponge. cupful butter, 1 cupful sugar, 3 eggs, + cupful Runkel's Cocoa, 1 teaspoonful cinnamon, 1 teaspoonful cloves, cupful milk, 2 cupfuls flour, 3 teaspoonfuls Calumet baking powder.
Three chocolate cakes, given in the shorthand of a period when every reader was assumed to know the proportions already. The transcription has lost several fractions, so read the quantities with care before you begin.
- Missing fractionsSeveral amounts are incomplete in the original printing: "cupful butter," "cupfuls sugar," "1 cupfuls flour," "+ cupful Runkel's Cocoa." These were almost certainly ½ or ¼ in the source, but the page as it stands does not say, and guessing at butter in particular will decide whether the cake holds together. Treat the first cake, which is the most complete, as the reliable one.
- Calumet baking powderStill sold, and still a double-acting powder built on sodium aluminium sulphate with an acid phosphate. Any modern double-acting powder substitutes measure for measure. Note that 2½ teaspoons to 1½ cups flour is heavy by current practice, where 1½ teaspoons would be usual; period powders were weaker and less uniform, which may account for the generous hand.
- Runkel's chocolate squaresRunkel Brothers of New York were chocolate and cocoa manufacturers. Baking chocolate of the period was conventionally moulded in squares of about an ounce, so two squares is most likely 2 oz; melt and cool slightly before it goes in. If you use sweetened or semisweet chocolate, cut the sugar.
- Runkel's cocoaProbably a natural, non-alkalized cocoa, though the page does not say. Dutch-process cocoa is less acidic and behaves differently with the baking powder, though with this much powder the cake will still rise.
- Mexican vanillaMcIlhenny's was one of many branded extracts of the era. Use ordinary vanilla extract. Genuine Mexican vanilla is worth having; avoid cheap "Mexican vanilla" of unknown origin, which has historically been cut with coumarin-bearing tonka bean.
- Oven temperatureNone is given, as these were written for a cook who judged by hand and eye. Bake all three at 350F: 30-35 minutes for the loaf, 25-30 for the single deep layer, checking with a skewer.
- "A long narrow pan"Read as a loaf or bar tin, roughly 9 by 5 inches. The recipe says only to cover the cooled cake with a white frosting.
- Splitting the layer cakeThe recipe calls for one deep layer split horizontally, "shortcake fashion." Let it cool completely and use a long serrated knife; a warm cake will tear.
- Cocoa Sponge has no methodThe ingredient list ends and nothing follows. Mix it as the first cake is mixed — cream butter and sugar, add eggs, then milk alternately with the sifted dry ingredients including the cocoa and spices. It is a spiced butter cake rather than a true sponge, despite the name.
- YieldEach makes one modest cake, perhaps 8 to 10 slices. These are small by modern standards; the first two are two-egg and single-egg cakes respectively.
This page belongs to a genre that flourished from the 1890s into the 1920s: the household compendium whose recipes name brands in every line. Calumet, Runkel Brothers and McIlhenny extracts appear not because the cook needed the specificity but because naming brands was the convention of the form. It also records a real shift. Unsweetened chocolate sold in one-ounce squares, and cocoa sold in tins as a powder, had by then become cheap and shelf-stable enough that chocolate moved further out of the drinking cup and into everyday baking. The heavy hand with baking powder tells its own story: chemical leavening seems to have largely displaced beaten eggs and yeast in the home kitchen over the course of a generation, and cooks were still learning how little of it they actually needed.