Home › Breads, Rolls, Muffins, Etc. › Devils Food Cake (C white sugar C butter egg)
Devils Food Cake (C white sugar C butter egg)
1 C white sugar ¼ C butter 1 egg 1 level t soda in ¼ C sour milk ½ C flour & 1/2 t baking powder Add to the above, but do not stir in: 2 squares Baker's Chocolate in ½ C boiling water.
Pour around edge of bowl and gradually work all ingredients together. Add 1 t vanilla. Mrs. M. R. Miller. 2 T butter
A small one-egg chocolate cake in the old "scalded chocolate" style, where boiling water is poured over the melted chocolate and worked in last. The method is the whole point of the recipe.
- The hinge: pour, don't stirThe chocolate-and-boiling-water mixture goes around the rim of the bowl and is worked inward a little at a time, exactly as written; the recipe is emphatic that it not be stirred straight in, and gradual incorporation keeps the hot liquid from setting the egg or thinning the batter all at once.
- Butter quantityThe butter is given as "14 C", which is not a workable amount; it is almost certainly 1/4 cup, the fraction having been flattened in the same way as "12 C boiling water". A stray "2 T butter" appears at the end with no instruction attached to it.
- Water quantity"12 C boiling water" cannot be right for 1 1/2 cups of flour. Half a cup is the amount that matches the rest of the formula and the pour-around-the-edge technique.
- Sour milkSour milk in 1900s baking is naturally clabbered raw milk, mildly acidic. Substitute buttermilk, or 1/4 cup milk with 3/4 teaspoon lemon juice or vinegar stirred in and left five minutes, so the soda has something to react with.
- Baker's chocolate squaresThese are unsweetened baking chocolate, one ounce per square, not modern semi-sweet. Two ounces of unsweetened chocolate is the correct swap; sweetened chocolate will throw the sugar balance.
- Soda and baking powder togetherThe soda is dissolved in the sour milk to neutralise its acid; the half teaspoon of baking powder is insurance for lift. Measure the soda level, as directed — excess soda gives a soapy taste and a reddish, mottled crumb.
- Pan and ovenThe book gives neither. This quantity fills one 8-inch round or a small loaf pan. Bake at 350F, about 25–30 minutes for the round, until the centre springs back.
- YieldA single modest layer, eight small slices. Split and fill, or simply dust with sugar; a boiled white icing is one period finish for a cake of this kind.
Devil's food appeared in American cookbooks around the turn of the twentieth century as the dark counterpart to angel food cake — the name is generally explained as that contrast, rich and dark against white and airy. Its reddish-brown cast came from alkaline baking soda reacting with the acidic cocoa solids in unsweetened chocolate, the same reaction behind the colour of early red velvet recipes. Recipes like this one, contributed under a cook's name to a community collection, passed the technique of scalding the chocolate with boiling water from household to household.