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Devils Food Cake (C light brown sugar square)
½ C light brown sugar 1 square Bakers chocolate 1/2 C sweet milk Mix above ingredients and heat to boiling point-cool. 1 C sugar 1/2 C sweet milk 1/2 C butter 2 eggs 1 t soda 2 C flour Cream butter and sugar. Add well beaten eggs and milk. Sift flour and soda together and add. Mix well and add to first mixture which should be cold. Mix all together well and bake in three layers in 375 degree oven for 30 minutes.
Mrs. Fred Mordhorst.
A standard mid-century chocolate layer cake built on the cooked-chocolate-paste method, which gives a darker crumb and better keeping quality than simply stirring chocolate into the batter. The typography of the original needs untangling before you start.
- "12 C light brown sugar"Almost certainly a compositor's mangling of 1/2 C, matching the 1/2 cup of milk it is cooked with. Twelve cups of sugar against one square of chocolate is not a paste, and the cake already carries a full cup of white sugar. Treat the quantity as ambiguous and use half a cup, packed.
- A square of Baker's chocolateOne ounce of unsweetened baking chocolate, which is what a square meant when this was written. Do not count squares off a modern bar; weigh out one ounce.
- Sweet milkPlain whole milk, specified to distinguish it from the sour milk or buttermilk that older recipes often called for. Do not substitute buttermilk here; the soda is balanced against the brown sugar and chocolate.
- The cooked mixture must be coldThe recipe says so twice, and it is the hinge. Adding a warm chocolate paste to a creamed butter batter breaks the emulsion and gives a greasy, dense layer. Make it first and let it come fully to room temperature, or make it the day before.
- Soda without an obvious acidThe lift comes from soda reacting with the brown sugar and natural cocoa, both mildly acidic. This is also what gives devil's food its reddish cast. There is no baking powder and no substitute for the soda.
- Pans and timingTwo cups of flour across three layers makes thin ones. Use three greased and floured 8-inch rounds and start checking at 20 minutes; 30 minutes at 375F will overbake shallow layers in a modern oven. A tester should come out with a few moist crumbs.
- No frosting is givenNot unusual in community cookbooks, where the icing was often left to the cook. A boiled white icing or a simple chocolate buttercream is period-appropriate; the cake yields about 12 servings.
Devil's food appears in American cookbooks from the early 1900s onward as a dark, rich, butter-based cake, generally understood as the counterpart to the pale, fatless, egg-white-light angel food; the pairing of names is usually taken as deliberate, though the origin is not documented. Its characteristic reddish-brown crumb comes from baking soda raising the pH of natural cocoa. The cooked chocolate-and-brown-sugar paste used here was a common trick for deepening flavor when only unsweetened baking squares were on hand, and it turns up under many names in community cookbooks of the period.