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Cookies, Cakes, and Doughnuts: Cake
Cocoa Cake. cupful butter, 2 cupfuls coffee sugar, 2 eggs, 1 cupful sour milk, 1 scant teaspoonful Calumet baking soda, 2 cupfuls flour, cupful Runkel's Cocoa.
Beat the butter and sugar to a cream, then add the other ingredients.
Bake in a moderate oven. Cover with chocolate icing.
Dried-Apple Cake. 2 cupfuls molasses, 3 cupfuls dried apples, 1 cupful butter, 1 cupful sugar, 1 cupful sour milk, 1 teaspoonful soda, 4 eggs, 4 cupfuls flour, 1 cupful currants, 1 cupful raisins, 1 teaspoonful cloves, 1 teaspoonful cinnamon, 1 nutmeg.
Soak apples in as little water as possible over night; in the morning chop fine and boil half an hour in molasses. When cold, add butter, sugar and milk dissolved with soda, eggs, flour, fruit, and spices. Bake in a slow oven.
Spice Cake. 1 cupful sugar, 2 eggs, 4 tablespoonfuls butter, cupful sour milk, cupful strong coffee, 1 teaspoonful soda, 1 teaspoonful Calumet baking powder, 2½ cupfuls flour, 1 teaspoonful cinnamon, 1 teaspoonful nutmeg.
Cream sugar and butter, and add the milk, coffee, soda, baking powder, flour, spice, cinnamon, and nutmeg. Bake in a medium-sized pan, and frost with powdered sugar mixed with cream.
Devil's Cake. 2 cupfuls dark-brown sugar, cupful butter, cupful sour milk, teaspoonful soda, 3 cupfuls flour, 1 teaspoonful Calumet baking powder, 2 eggs, cupful Runkel's Chocolate, ground.
Four cake formulas of the sour-milk-and-soda school, printed with brand names intact. The transcription has lost several fractions, so read the ingredient lists with care before committing butter to a bowl.
- The missing fractionsSeveral quantities begin "cupful" with no number: the butter in the cocoa cake, the sour milk and cocoa, the butter and sour milk and coffee in the spice cake, and most of the devil's cake. A half cupful is the likeliest reading in most of these places, but it is only a guess and the page gives no confirmation. Treat the amounts as genuinely uncertain rather than guessing your way through a 2-cup batter.
- Sour milk and sodaSour milk here means naturally clabbered raw milk, acidic enough to react with the soda. Cultured buttermilk is the working substitute, cup for cup; pasteurised milk left on the counter simply spoils. The soda is the only leavening in two of these cakes -- the cocoa and the dried-apple -- so it must go in with the liquid and the batter must reach the oven promptly.
- Coffee sugarA coarse-grained granulated sugar sold for sweetening coffee, not sugar flavoured with coffee. Ordinary granulated sugar is the equivalent, though it will cream into the butter faster than the coarse grain did.
- Oven temperaturesA moderate oven for the cocoa cake is about 350F; a slow oven for the dense, fruited dried-apple cake is about 300F, and a cake that size may want an hour and a half or more. The spice cake, unspecified, belongs at about 350F.
- The brand namesCalumet was a Chicago baking powder company; the book calls for "Calumet baking soda" and "Calumet baking powder" as separate items, and they are separate items — sodium bicarbonate and a complete leavener. Runkel's cocoa and "Runkel's Chocolate, ground" are likewise different things: unsweetened cocoa powder in the first cake, grated unsweetened block chocolate in the last.
- Dried applesThe overnight soak, chop, and half-hour simmer in molasses is the whole point of that cake — the fruit becomes a dark preserve that carries the spice. Use unsulphured dried apple rings; modern soft-dried fruit needs less soaking and will break down faster in the molasses.
- One nutmegA whole nutmeg grated yields roughly 2 to 3 teaspoons, which is a great deal even in a four-cup-of-flour fruit cake. Start at 2 teaspoons if you are grating your own.
- The devil's cake is incompleteNo method, no pan, no oven, and with the fractions lost the batter as printed reads dry. It reads as a standard sour-milk chocolate cake -- cream butter and sugar, add eggs, alternate flour with soured milk, fold in the ground chocolate -- but the page does not say so, and the missing fractions make it a reconstruction rather than a recipe.
- Pans and yieldNone of the four gives a pan size. The cocoa and spice cakes suit a single 9-inch square or two 8-inch rounds and serve eight to ten; the dried-apple cake, with four cups of flour and three of fruit, fills a 10-inch tube pan and serves sixteen or more.
These pages sit at the point where the household compendium met the advertising department. Calumet, a Chicago baking powder firm of the 1890s, and Runkel Brothers, the New York chocolate and cocoa makers, both circulated recipe leaflets, and compilations like Household Discoveries absorbed the branded wording wholesale — hence "Calumet baking soda" rather than simply soda. The chemistry underneath is older than either company: sour milk beaten with saleratus or soda was the standard American home leavening long before packaged baking powder, and cooks kept using it because the clabbered milk from the day before was free. Dried-apple cake belongs to the same thrift. Apples dried in quantity at harvest were a winter staple across the northern states, and stewing them down in molasses turned a stored fruit into something that passed for candied peel in a rich, keeping cake. Devil's cake — the darker answer to angel food, with the earliest printed recipes dating from the opening years of the twentieth century — appears here without a method, perhaps, though one can only guess at the compiler's reasons, because the reader was expected to know already what to do with it.