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Chocolate Cake
1 1/2 pounds grated chocolate. 12 eggs. 1 3/4 pounds brown sugar. 1 teaspoonful cinnamon. 1 teaspoonful nutmeg. 1 teaspoonful cloves. A few coriander-seed.
Break the eggs in the sugar and beat them, adding the chocolate by degrees, until well incorporated; then add the spices, all of which must be well powdered. Grease some small tins with lard, and bake quickly.--Mrs. T. Chocolate Cake. 2 cupfuls sugar. 1 cupful butter. 3 cupfuls flour. 3/4 cupful sour cream or milk. 3 eggs. 1 teaspoonful cream tartar. 1/2 teaspoonful soda. Beat the sugar and butter together; break the eggs into it one at a time; then add the flour, then the sour cream with the soda. Bake in jelly-cake pans. Filling: two ounces of chocolate, one cupful of sugar, three-quarters cup of sweet milk; boil half-done.--Mrs. F.
Chocolate Cake. 3 cupfuls sifted flour. 1 1/2 cupfuls sugar. 1 cupful sweet milk. 1 egg 2 tablespoonfuls butter. 1 teaspoonfuls soda. 2 teaspoonfuls cream tartar. 1 teaspoonful essence lemon.
Beat the butter and sugar to a cream, then add the milk (in which the soda should be dissolved), next the eggs well beaten, and lastly the essence. Mix two cupfuls of flour, and afterwards the third cupful of flour into which the cream tartar has been stirred. Bake in square, flat pans. Grate three ounces of chocolate, add four tablespoonfuls of milk; warm slowly, and add eight tablespoonfuls of white sugar. Boil three minutes, and pour over top of the cake. If you choose, you can slice open the cake, and put inside of it a custard of one point of milk, warmed, and two eggs added, with sugar and flour to your taste.--Mrs. H.
Chocolate Cake. 2 cupfuls sugar. 1 cupful butter. Yolks of 5 eggs and whites of 2. 1 cupful milk. 3 1/2 cupfuls flour. 1/2 teaspoonful soda. 1 teaspoonful cream tartar, sifted in the flour. Bake in jelly-cake tins.
Filling: whites of three eggs, one and a half cupfuls of sugar, three tablespoonfuls of grated chocolate, one teaspoonful of vanilla. Beat well together; spread on top and between layers of the cake.--Mrs. K. Chocolate Cake.
Cream together one pound sugar, one and a half pounds butter. Beat eight eggs light without separating; stir them gradually into the sugar and butter. Sift in one pound of flour: beat all light. Then put in an even teaspoonful of soda dissolved in a half-teacupful of sweet milk, two even teaspoonfuls cream tartar dissolved in the same quantity of milk. Season with lemon or vanilla. Bake in jelly pans.
Icing for the same: nine tablespoonfuls of water, one pound of sugar; boil till it glistens.
Beat the whites of four eggs to a stiff froth. Stir them into the boiling icing, then add one-quarter pound grated chocolate.
Spread the icing between the cakes and over the top.--Miss S.
Five contributors' chocolate cakes printed under one heading, and they are not variations on a theme: the first has no flour at all, while the rest are butter cakes leavened with soda and cream of tartar. Read whichever one you mean to bake straight through before starting, since the fillings are given as afterthoughts.
- Grated chocolate means unsweetenedEvery one of these calls for chocolate grated from a solid cake, which in this period usually meant plain, unsweetened chocolate. Use unsweetened baking chocolate, not semisweet and not cocoa powder; the sugar quantities appear to be calculated against a bitter chocolate.
- Mrs. T's cake is not a cakeA pound and a half of chocolate, twelve eggs, brown sugar and spice, with no flour and no leavening, bakes into dense little spiced chocolate confections closer to a torte or a chocolate macaroon than a layer cake. Expect them to set at the edges and stay soft in the middle.
- "Bake quickly"The recipes give no oven temperatures. A quick oven is conventionally reckoned somewhere around 400-450F, so Mrs. T's small tins want a short bake at fairly high heat -- roughly the time you would give something the size of a muffin cup. The layer cakes that follow are better baked more moderately; judge them by look and touch rather than a stated time.
- Soda and cream of tartarOne teaspoonful soda with two of cream of tartar is homemade baking powder; roughly four teaspoons of modern double-acting baking powder does the same work. Mrs. F's cake offers sour cream or milk and still calls for cream of tartar as well as soda; where sour dairy is used, the acid in it also gives the soda something to react with.
- PansJelly-cake tins are shallow round layer pans, eight or nine inches across and about an inch deep, filled thinly so the layers bake fast and stack. "Square, flat pans" in Mrs. H's cake means a single sheet, roughly an 8x8 or 9x9.
- Weights in Miss S's cakeOne pound of sugar to one and a half pounds of butter is more fat than sugar and more fat than flour, which is out of line with every other cake on the page and looks like a transposition. Treat the proportions as unreliable. For the others, a pound of sifted flour is about 3 1/2 to 4 cups and a pound of sugar about 2 1/4 cups.
- Mrs. K's filling is uncookedThree raw whites beaten with sugar and grated chocolate is an uncooked meringue frosting that never reaches a safe temperature. Miss S's icing, by contrast, has boiling sugar syrup stirred into the whites, which is the safer method and also holds better on a cake.
- The fillings need judgment"Boil half-done" in Mrs. F's filling appears to mean a chocolate syrup cooked only until it coats a spoon but is still pourable; it will set as a thin glaze rather than a spreadable frosting. "One point of milk" in Mrs. H's custard is a pint.
- YieldNone of the five gives one. The three- to three-and-a-half-cup flour cakes make two generous nine-inch layers, twelve to sixteen slices; Miss S's pound-of-flour batter will fill three.
Housekeeping in Old Virginia was compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree and published in 1878, gathering contributions from some 250 Virginia housekeepers, which is why five different chocolate cakes sit stacked under a single heading with their authors reduced to initials. Chocolate arrives here at the moment it was becoming an ordinary baking ingredient rather than a drink: it is still sold as a hard cake to be grated, and the compilers assume no cook needs the word explained. Mrs. T's flourless version, with cinnamon, cloves, nutmeg and coriander seed, belongs to the older tradition in which chocolate was inseparable from spice, a habit generally traced to the Spanish adaptation of Mesoamerican chocolate drinks and one that survived in confectionery long after plain sweet chocolate had taken over. The four cakes that follow show the newer American style: creamed butter and sugar, soda and cream of tartar mixed to order in place of commercial baking powder, and chocolate confined to the filling and the icing rather than worked into the batter at all.