Home › Breads, Rolls, Muffins, Etc. › Devils Food Cake (Large T melted chocolate eggs)
Devils Food Cake (Large T melted chocolate eggs)
3 large T melted chocolate 2 eggs ¾ C sour milk 1 t soda 1 heaping C flour Vanilla Mrs. Lester.
Combine above ingredients reserving one egg white for frosting.
A community-cookbook shorthand recipe: it assumes the reader already knows how a cake is put together, and so it omits the sugar, the fat, and the baking entirely. Read the points below before you start, because what is missing matters more than what is written.
- The recipe is incomplete as printedThere is no sugar, no butter, and no baking instruction. Comparable devil's food recipes of the period suggest something on the order of 1 to 1 1/4 cups sugar and about 1/2 cup butter creamed together, with the melted chocolate, eggs, soured milk and flour added after, but these amounts are a reconstruction, not part of the original. Treat the original as a note to a cook who knew the method, not as a full formula.
- "34 C sour milk"A typesetting loss of the fraction bar: read 3/4 cup. Sour milk means milk that has naturally clabbered; buttermilk is the closest modern equivalent, or add 2 teaspoons lemon juice or vinegar to 3/4 cup whole milk and let it stand ten minutes.
- "3 large T melted chocolate"Unsweetened baking chocolate, melted and measured in the liquid state; three tablespoons is about 1 1/2 ounces by weight. Chocolate sold as semisweet or bittersweet today carries its own sugar and will throw the balance off.
- Soda, not baking powderThe teaspoon of soda is there to react with the acid in the sour milk, which is also what lifts the cake. If you substitute sweet milk the soda has nothing to work on and you will get a flat, soapy-tasting crumb.
- "1 heaping C flour"A heaping cup runs to roughly 5 to 5 1/2 ounces, or about 155 g. Flour of the period was often softer than today's all-purpose; measure by weight if you can and mix only until the batter comes together.
- BakingNo pan, temperature or time is given. With only a heaping cup of flour this is a small batter, closer to one 8-inch layer or square than two; a moderate oven of about 350F for 25 to 30 minutes, until a tester comes out clean, is a reasonable modern guess. Yield perhaps six to eight servings.
- The reserved egg whiteIt is held back for a frosting, which is not printed here. If you finish the cake with an uncooked white-and-sugar icing, use pasteurized egg white; a cooked seven-minute or boiled icing avoids the question altogether.
Devil's food appears in American cookbooks around the turn of the twentieth century, the name generally understood as the dark counterpart to the pale, airy angel food cake that preceded it. Its character comes from the pairing of unsweetened chocolate with soured milk and baking soda: the alkaline soda deepens the cocoa's color toward brown and mahogany, while the reddish tinge associated with red velvet is generally traced to the acid of the soured milk acting on non-alkalized cocoa. That the recipe runs to a single line signed "Mrs. Lester" is typical of church and society fundraiser books, where recipes were collected as reminders rather than as full instructions.