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Mahogany Cake
Mrs. Robt. H. Grummitt. 1½ C sugar Good 1½ C shortening 2 eggs ½ C flour 3 T cocoa 3 t cocoa 1 t soda 1/3 C boiling water 2 scant C flour 1 C sugar 1 t baking powder 1 T shortening ¼ t salt 2 eggs 1 t vanilla 1 C buttermilk or sour milk Mrs. Chas. H. Kaiser.
This page is a scan of a community-cookbook column in which two contributors' cakes have run together, and the OCR has mangled several of the fractions. Read it as ingredient lists, not as a method, and reconstruct the proportions before you commit butter to a bowl.
- Two recipes, not oneMrs. Grummitt's cake ends somewhere around the boiling water; the second list (2 scant C flour, 1 C sugar, baking powder, buttermilk, and a second pair of eggs) belongs to Mrs. Kaiser, whose name trails at the bottom. Attempting to combine every line into a single batter will give you far too much flour and sugar for the fat and eggs present.
- Doubled cocoa lineThe cocoa appears twice, as "3 T cocoa" and "3 t cocoa"; this is one ingredient printed twice with differing measures. The tablespoon reading is the plausible one for a chocolate cake of this size.
- The hinge: bloom the cocoaThe hinge: the boiling water -- The 1/3 cup boiling water most likely goes to the cocoa rather than serving as a liquid adjustment; the list does not say. Cocoa stirred into boiling water and cooled slightly is generally held to deepen colour and flavour. If you read it that way, mix cocoa and water to a smooth paste and add it to the batter rather than to the dry ingredients.
- Soda versus baking powderThe first list leans on 1 t soda, which needs an acid; the second supplies buttermilk or sour milk. If your reconstruction of the first cake has no sour dairy, the soda has nothing to work against and the crumb will taste soapy. Sour milk in older recipes of this kind meant naturally soured raw milk; use buttermilk, or milk with a tablespoon of vinegar per cup.
- ShorteningIn compilations of this kind "shortening" may mean lard, butter, or a hydrogenated fat, used more or less interchangeably. Butter gives the best flavor; cream it with the sugar until pale before the eggs go in.
- No oven direction givenNeither list states a temperature or time. A modern reconstruction of a cake this size would be baked around 350F, checking from about 25 minutes for thin layers and later for a single deeper pan; the figures are ours, not the book's.
- YieldEach list would make roughly one modest two-layer cake. No frosting is specified in either list.
Mahogany cake is the name American home cooks gave to a buttermilk-and-cocoa layer cake whose crumb bakes to a distinct reddish brown, a tint usually attributed to acid in the batter acting on the non-alkalized cocoa then sold in grocery stores. That same reaction is often said to have produced the ancestor of what later became red velvet cake, once cocoa was Dutch-processed and the color had to be added from a bottle. Cakes of this type are generally thought to have spread in the early twentieth century because packaged cocoa was cheap and shelf-stable in a way that block chocolate was not, and they turn up constantly in church and ladies'-aid compilations like this one, where each recipe carries a contributor's married name and assumes a reader who already knows how to cream butter and judge a moderate oven.