Home › Breads, Rolls, Muffins, Etc. › Devils Food Cake (C thick sour milk squares)
Devils Food Cake (C thick sour milk squares)
1/4 C shortening. 1 C sugar. 2 eggs. 1 1/2 C flour. 1 1/2 t baking powder. 1/2 t salt. 12 C thick sour milk 2 squares bitter chocolate 12 C boiling water 1 t soda 1 t vanilla Cream shortening, add sugar. Cream until light and fluffy. Add well-beaten eggs. Sift flour and baking powder and salt, and add alternately with sour milk to butter mixture. Pour boiling water into melted chocolate; mix quickly. Add soda to chocolate-stir until thick. Cool slightly before adding to cake batter. Mix thoroughly, add vanilla and pour into two layer cake pans. Bake in moderate oven for 25 minutes. Mrs. J. B. Peaco.
Note: Mrs. W. G. Wells uses 1¼ C flour and ½t baking powder.
A standard creaming-method devil's food from a community collection, built on the old trick of blooming chocolate with boiling water and soda. The method is sound; the quantities as printed are not all usable, so read them with care.
- Incomplete quantitiesThe list gives no amounts for shortening, sugar, eggs, flour, baking powder or salt, and two of the surviving numbers have lost their fractions: "12 C thick sour milk" and "12 C boiling water" are almost certainly ½ cup each. The note's 1¼ cups flour with ½ teaspoon baking powder is what the page gives. Work from a devil's food formula you trust for the missing amounts, and use this page for its method.
- Moderate oven350F. Two 8- or 9-inch layers will take 25 to 30 minutes; the cake is done when the centre springs back and a tester comes out with a crumb or two clinging.
- Thick sour milkThis means milk deliberately clabbered at room temperature, closer to a loose yogurt than to today's thin buttermilk. Cultured buttermilk is the nearest substitute; plain whole-milk yogurt thinned slightly with milk is closer to the texture the recipe assumes. Milk soured with vinegar will work but gives less body.
- Bitter chocolateUnsweetened baking chocolate, sold in 1-ounce squares then as now. Two squares is 2 ounces. Do not substitute semisweet or the sugar balance shifts and the crumb turns heavy.
- The hinge: the chocolate pastePour the boiling water over the melted chocolate, stir in the soda, and let it thicken and cool before it meets the batter. Added hot, it will melt the creamed shortening and the cake loses its lift. Added properly, the soda both darkens the chocolate and reacts with the sour milk to raise the cake.
- Soda and baking powder togetherThe soda is there to neutralise the acid in the sour milk; the baking powder does the remaining lifting. If you swap buttermilk for thick sour milk you may find the batter slightly less acidic, so keep the soda at 1 teaspoon and no more or the cake takes on a soapy edge.
- YieldTwo layers, filled and iced, serving ten to twelve. A boiled white icing or a plain chocolate fudge frosting is what a book of this kind would have expected.
Devil's food appears in American cookbooks from around the turn of the twentieth century, the dark counterpart to the pale angel food that preceded it, and community collections like this one carried it into many home kitchens. The characteristic reddish-brown colour is generally attributed to baking soda reacting with natural, non-alkalised cocoa solids; the boiling-water-and-soda step here is doing that work deliberately. Thick sour milk was a practical ingredient rather than a stylish one in a period when milk soured on the shelf as a matter of course. The double attribution at the foot of the page, with a second contributor's variation on the flour and baking powder, is characteristic of compiled community books.