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Brown Stone Fruit Cake
½ C grated or melted chocolate Boil until thick. Cool and add to the following:
Elizabeth Kohner. 1/2 C sweet milk ½ C granulated sugar 1 egg 1 C granulated sugar 2 C flour 1 t soda dissolved in a little hot water 1/3 C butter or Crisco 2 eggs 1/2 C sweet milk Bake in two or three layers and put together with either chocolate or boiled icing.
Mrs. W. W. Carroll.
The type is scrambled here: two ingredient lists and two contributors' names have collapsed into one block. Read it as a cooked chocolate base that is boiled, cooled, and then stirred into a plain butter cake batter.
- Sort the two lists firstMost likely the boiled part is the chocolate with the 1/2 cup milk, 1½ cups sugar and 1 egg (chocolate alone will not "boil until thick"), leaving the 1 cup sugar, 2 cups flour, soda, 1/3 cup butter or Crisco, 2 eggs and second 1/2 cup milk as the cake batter. Cream butter and sugar, add eggs, then flour alternately with milk, then the cooled chocolate mixture and the dissolved soda last.
- The hingeThe boiled chocolate custard must be genuinely cool before it goes into the batter. Warm, it will melt the creamed butter and the cake bakes dense and greasy.
- Chocolate quantities are suspectA cup and a half of grated chocolate with a cup and a half of sugar in the boiled portion is a great deal for a two-cup-flour cake. If you scale down, halve both together.
- "Grated chocolate"Unsweetened baking chocolate, grated from the cake or block. Modern semisweet chips or Dutch-process cocoa are not substitutes without adjusting the sugar and the acid the soda depends on.
- Sweet milkPlain fresh whole milk, specified only to distinguish it from the soured milk or buttermilk that appears elsewhere in these books.
- Soda and no baking powderThe teaspoon of soda is the only leavening, and it works against the acidity of the unsweetened chocolate. Dissolve it in a tablespoon of hot water and add it at the very end, then get the pans into the oven promptly.
- CriscoAn option worth noting for date: hydrogenated shortening reached American kitchens in 1911, and its appearance beside butter places this book after that. Butter gives the better flavor.
- Oven and timeNo temperature is given. Bake at 350F; two 9-inch layers take about 30 minutes, three thinner layers about 22 to 25, until a tester comes out clean.
- Yield and finishingEnough for one 9-inch layer cake, twelve or so servings. Boiled icing here means the meringue-style frosting made by beating hot sugar syrup into egg whites.
The name is often said to be a corruption of "brown stone front cake," a late nineteenth-century American cake whose dark, evenly grained crumb was traditionally likened to the brownstone rowhouse fronts then going up by the block in New York, Boston and Chicago, though the etymology is not documented. What distinguishes it from an ordinary chocolate cake is the technique: chocolate, sugar, milk and egg are cooked to a thick paste first, which both smooths the gritty grated baking chocolate of the day and deepens the color. The two contributors' names tangled into one entry suggest at most a compiled community collection, the kind assembled from recipes arriving on cards from dozens of members.