Cake: Runkel
Fudge Frosting. 2 cupfuls sugar, cupful milk, 1 tablespoonful butter, cupful Runkel's Chocolate, grated, 1 teaspoonful McIlhenny's Mexican Vanilla, 1 cupful chopped walnuts.
Put the sugar, milk, butter, and chocolate into a granite saucepan and stir occasionally till the mixture reaches the boiling point. Boil without stirring eight minutes, then take from the fire and beat till creamy.
At this point add the nuts and vanilla, then pour over the cake. This recipe makes a delicious fudge.
Feather Cake. 4 tablespoonfuls butter, 1 cupful sugar, 1½ cupfuls flour, 2½ teaspoonfuls baking powder, 2 eggs, ½ cupful milk, 1 teaspoonful McIlhenny's Mexican Vanilla.
MRS. CURTIS'S COOKBOOK Put butter in mixing bowl, work it with a spoon till creamy, add sugar gradually, and continue creaming Sift flour and baking powder together; separate yolks of eggs from whites, beat yolks till light-colored and thick, then add milk and egg mixture to creamed butter and sugar, alternately with flour. Add flavoring, stir and beat well; lastly add whites of eggs beaten stiff. Put in a shallow greased and floured pan, or one lined with buttered paper. Bake about thirty minutes or till cake shrinks from the pan, and does not stick when tried with a straw. The feather cake may be varied and made into a number of different kinds, for instance:
Spice Cake.-Before adding the beaten whites, put in cupful seeded raisins that have been washed, dried, cut in halves, and rolled in a little of the flour reserved for the purpose.
Flavor with teaspoonful ground cloves, teaspoonful cinnamon, and a grating nutmeg instead of vanilla.
Marble Cake. - Color half the feather-cake mixture with tablespoonful Runkel's Chocolate melted. Mix the white and dark part when putting it in the pan, so they will be well mingled though distinct.
Ribbon Cake. - To one third the feather-cake mixture add ½ teaspoonful mixed spices and 1/2 cupful seeded raisins cut in pieces. Bake in a shallow pan, and the remainder in two other shallow pans. When done, put the fruit cake between the others with a layer of jelly or frosting between.
Layer Cake. --Bake feather-cake mixture in round tins and put a cream, chocolate, or other filling be tween.
A fudge frosting plus a plain butter cake that the book treats as a base for four variations. Several quantities in the text have lost their fractions, so treat the amounts below as the working guide.
- The frosting is fudge, so watch the boilTwo cups sugar with about half a cup of milk, a tablespoon of butter and roughly half a cup of grated chocolate, boiled undisturbed for eight minutes, lands near the soft-ball stage (about 235F). A candy thermometer is more reliable than the clock, since eight minutes on a modern high-output burner can overshoot badly.
- Beat, then work fastBeating off the heat is what makes it creamy rather than grainy. Once it thickens it sets quickly, so have the cake ready and pour immediately after the nuts and vanilla go in.
- Grated chocolateRunkel's was a New York chocolate and cocoa brand; the grated chocolate called for here was most likely unsweetened baking chocolate. Use unsweetened chocolate, chopped fine or grated; sweetened chips will make the frosting cloying against two cups of sugar.
- Granite saucepanGraniteware means enamelled steel. Any heavy nonreactive pan works; a heavy base matters more than the material, as thin pans scorch the milk sugars.
- Cake oven and panBake the feather cake at 350F. "A shallow pan" here means a single square or rectangular layer roughly 8 by 8 inches; a straw is the period's toothpick test.
- Baking powderTwo and a half teaspoons to a cup and a half of flour is heavy by modern standards. One and a half to two teaspoons of current double-acting powder gives a better crumb and no aftertaste.
- Folding the whitesThe whites go in last and are the only lift beyond the powder. Fold them in with a spatula rather than beating, or the cake loses the lightness that gives it its name.
- Dredging the fruitReserving a little of the measured flour to roll the raisins in keeps them suspended rather than sunk. Do the same with the chopped walnuts if you fold any into the cake itself.
- YieldThe frosting makes enough to cover a single 8-inch layer generously, or to fill and top two thin ones. The cake serves eight to nine.
This page comes from the kind of promotional cookery writing that flourished in the early 1900s, when brand names were being stitched directly into recipe text: Runkel Brothers of New York sold cocoa and baking chocolate, and McIlhenny's Mexican Vanilla was likewise a proprietary extract, so a household recipe doubles as advertising copy. The cake itself belongs to an older and more useful tradition, the single "foundation" batter that a cook varied rather than replaced. Feather cake, so called for its light crumb, was a familiar American butter cake of the period, and books of this era often showed how the same bowl of batter became spice, marble, ribbon or layer cake depending on what was folded in or spread between.