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Devils Food (Mrs A M Lovell C sugar C)
Mrs. A. M. Lovell. 2 C sugar ¾ C butter 4 oz. Baker's Chocolate 4 eggs (3 may be used) 2¼ C flour 4½ t Royal baking powder ¼ t salt 1½ t cinnamon ¼ t cloves 1¼ C milk Cream butter, adding sugar gradually while beating to a cream. Add chocolate (melted) and beaten egg yolks, mixing thoroughly. Sift together flour, salt, cinnamon, cloves and baking powder, and add to butter mixture alternately with the milk. At the last, fold in stiffly beaten egg whites and bake in deep layer pans and ice when cold. Margaret Smock.
A spiced chocolate layer cake of the early twentieth century, leavened with baking powder rather than the soured milk and soda that gave the original devil's food its reddish tinge. Several quantities in the printed text have lost their fractions, so read the amounts against the notes below before mixing.
- Damaged measurementsThe butter, flour, salt, cloves and milk quantities are printed without their fraction marks: read them as roughly three-quarters cup butter, a quarter teaspoon each of salt and cloves, and two and a quarter to two and a half cups flour. The milk is genuinely ambiguous, written as either a quarter cup or a cup and a quarter; a batter with two cups of sugar and this much flour will want closer to the larger figure, but add it gradually and judge by the batter.
- Baking powderFour and a half teaspoons is high for this volume of flour and may be a misprint. Two teaspoons for two and a quarter cups of flour is the standard modern proportion, and more can leave a soapy taste and a coarse crumb.
- Baker's ChocolateThis means unsweetened baking chocolate, not a sweetened bar. Four ounces is four squares of the traditional package. Melt it over hot water and let it cool to barely warm before beating it into the creamed butter, or it will loosen the mixture.
- OvenNo temperature is given. Butter layers of this type bake at 350F. Deep layer pans of eight or nine inches will take 30 to 35 minutes; test with a skewer at the centre.
- Pans"Deep layer pans" means straight-sided round tins about two inches deep rather than the shallow jelly-cake tins also common at the time. Grease and line the bottoms; a batter this rich with chocolate sticks.
- The egg whitesFolding stiffly beaten whites in at the end helps keep the crumb light. Fold in a third first to slacken the batter, then the rest, and stop while a few streaks remain.
- Three eggs or fourFour gives a taller, more tender layer.
- Yield and icingEnough for two or three eight- or nine-inch layers. The instruction to ice when cold matters with a boiled or fondant-style icing of the period, which will slide off a warm cake.
Devil's food appears in American community cookbooks from around the turn of the twentieth century, generally understood as the dark answer to angel food cake, which was white, eggy and fatless. Early versions took their colour and their faint red cast from the reaction of natural cocoa with soda and sour milk; this one has moved to baking powder and sweet milk, a shift that followed the spread of cheap and reliable commercial powders. The cinnamon and cloves are worth noticing, as they place the recipe closer to the older spice-cake tradition than to the plain chocolate layers that came later. Church and society cookbooks of this kind were often compiled from members' submitted recipes, which may explain quantities copied in the shorthand of a cook who already knew the proportions.