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Fudge Cake
4 ozs. (1/2 cup) butter 1/2 lb. (I cup) sugar 2 eggs 1 gill (1/2 cup) milk 2½ teaspoonfuls baking powder 2 ozs. melted unsweetened chocolate 6 ozs. (1½ cups) flour ½ teaspoonful vanilla extract Cream the butter and sugar together, then add the yolks of eggs well beaten, the whites stiffly beaten, milk, flour, baking powder, chocolate, and extracts. Mix well and pour into a buttered and floured shallow casserole. Bake for forty minutes in a moderate oven. When cold, cover with any good white frosting.
A plain chocolate butter cake baked in an earthenware dish rather than a tin — the whole point of the book it comes from. The measurements are given twice, in weights and cups, which helps where the type has been mangled.
- The baking powderThe printed page gives 2½ teaspoonfuls of baking powder, as our text now reads. That is generous for 6 ozs. of flour; 2 teaspoons gives a cleaner crumb and less of a chemical aftertaste.
- A gillHalf a cup, as the recipe itself notes — 4 fluid ounces. Older British gills run to 5 fl oz, but the parenthetical here settles it.
- Weights over cups6 oz flour is about 1⅓ cups scooped and levelled by modern American practice, not 1½. Weigh it if you can: 170 g flour, 225 g sugar, 115 g butter, 55 g chocolate.
- Moderate oven350F (175C). Forty minutes would suit a shallow dish of roughly 8 by 8 inches or a 9-inch round, though the recipe gives no size; earthenware heats more slowly than metal, so start testing at 35 minutes and expect to go past 40 if the dish is thick.
- Unsweetened chocolateTwo ounces of baking chocolate, the block kind with no sugar. Cocoa powder is not a straight swap here — it would need added fat and would change the liquid balance.
- The separated eggsThe whites are beaten stiff and the recipe then says to mix everything well, which will knock most of the air out. Folding the whites in last, gently, after the flour and chocolate, is the likelier intent, and it is what would make this lighter than a straight one-bowl cake.
- Butter the dish properlyA cake baked in earthenware is often served from the dish, as it may not turn out cleanly. Butter and flour it thoroughly, or line the base with parchment if you mean to lift it.
- YieldProbably eight to ten servings. "Any good white frosting" would mean a boiled or confectioners'-sugar icing; spread it only when the cake is fully cold or it will slide.
Fudge cake in American cookbooks of the early twentieth century generally meant a chocolate butter cake, not the dense flourless thing the name suggests now — the name is usually traced to fudge candy, which had become a fashionable confection at American women's colleges in the 1880s and 1890s. Its appearance in a book about casserole dishes is the interesting part: fireproof earthenware was being marketed in that period as a vessel that could go from oven to table, and publishers put out slim volumes demonstrating how much could be cooked in one, cake included. The result is a conventional recipe redirected into an unconventional pan, which is why the instruction reads "shallow casserole" where most other books of the era would have said layer tins.