Cake: Fudge
Fudge Cake. (An original recipe from the Copper Kettle Lunch Room at Smith College.) 1 cupful sugar, cupful butter, 2 eggs, ½ cupful milk, 1½ cupfuls flour, 2½ teaspoonfuls Calumet baking powder, 2 ounces melted chocolate.
Cream together the butter and sugar, add the beaten yolks of eggs, then the milk and flour sifted with the baking powder. Beat well, add chocolate and the whites of eggs whipped to a stiff froth. Bake in a shallow pan in a moderate oven.
When cool, pour over it a fudge frosting and mark in squares before the frosting has hardened.
A plain creamed-butter chocolate layer baked flat and cut into squares — closer to what we would now call a sheet cake or brownie than a layer cake. The method is straightforward; most of what needs translating is the shorthand of a 1900s ingredient list.
- Butter quantityThe butter measure has lost its fraction and reads simply "cupful." For a cake with 1 cup sugar and 1½ cups flour, ½ cup (1 stick, 4 oz) is the proportion that works; a full cup would be greasy and would slump in the pan.
- Moderate ovenRoughly 350F; period usage for "moderate" spans about 350-375F. In a shallow pan the cake will be done in roughly 25-30 minutes — test with a skewer rather than watching the clock, since pan size varies.
- Shallow panA 9-inch square or an 8x12 pan gives the thin slab this recipe wants, about an inch high, so that squares cut cleanly through cake and frosting together.
- The chocolateTwo ounces of melted chocolate in a period recipe means unsweetened baking chocolate, not eating chocolate. Modern unsweetened bars are a direct substitute; using semisweet will make the cake noticeably sweeter and slightly softer.
- Calumet baking powderA brand name; brand names appear routinely in recipes of this era, and manufacturers were often involved in supplying or sponsoring such recipes. Any double-acting baking powder works, and 2½ teaspoons for 1½ cups flour is on the generous side — 2 teaspoons is closer to modern practice.
- Folding the whitesThe whipped whites go in last and should be folded, not beaten, or the leavening you have just built collapses. The batter will look streaky until the final few strokes.
- The frosting is not given"A fudge frosting" assumed the reader knew one: a boiled sugar, butter, milk and chocolate mixture cooked to the soft-ball stage, beaten until it loses its gloss, and poured while still pourable. It sets fast, which is why the squares are marked immediately.
- YieldAbout 16 to 20 squares from a 9-inch pan, depending how you mark it.
The Copper Kettle was one of the small tea and lunch rooms that clustered around women's colleges in the early twentieth century, and Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts had several. Fudge itself is generally traced to those same colleges in the 1880s and 1890s u2014 Vassar, Smith and Wellesley all lay claim to early batches made over gas lamps in dormitory rooms u2014 and "fudge cake" is the natural next step, a cake built to carry a fudge frosting rather than a butter one. The naming of Calumet baking powder in the ingredient list is worth noticing: a brand printed in the text was a form of advertising that readers of the day took entirely for granted.