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Chocolate Nut Cakes
4 squares Lowney's Premium Chocolate, grated 1½ cups sugar 3 teaspoons baking powder 24 cups flour ½ cup milk 8 egg whites 1 teaspoon vanilla 1 cup nut meats broken in pieces salt 1/2 cup butter Cream butter; add sugar, flour in which baking powder has been sifted, and milk, and beat well; add whites of eggs beaten stiff and nut meats; then add chocolate and vanilla. Pour into buttered gem pans and bake in hot oven twenty-five minutes. ½ cup butter 2 cups sugar 4 egg yolks 1 cup milk
A white-batter nut cake baked in individual gem pans, with grated unsweetened chocolate folded in near the end. Two of the ingredient quantities have not survived in usable form, so read the list carefully before starting.
- Missing quantitiesThe flour is printed as "24 cups," which cannot be right for this batter; the butter has lost its figure entirely. A cake of this size and shape would normally take somewhere near 2 to 2 1/4 cups flour and 1/2 to 3/4 cup butter, but the original does not say, so treat both as unverified rather than settled.
- The chocolateLowney's Premium was plain unsweetened chocolate, comparable to today's baking chocolate; squares of this period were generally an ounce apiece, so four squares is about 4 oz. Grating rather than melting it keeps the batter pale and studded rather than uniformly brown.
- "Hot oven"In American books of this period that means roughly 400-425F. Small cakes at that heat for twenty-five minutes is on the long side; start checking at eighteen.
- Gem pansGem pans were heavy cast-iron trays with rounded or oval cups, generally somewhat smaller in capacity than a modern muffin cup. A well-buttered twelve-cup muffin tin can stand in. Yield is impossible to state with the flour and butter quantities unresolved.
- Order of mixingThe instructions have you cream butter and sugar, then add flour and milk together and beat, before folding in the whites. Beating after the flour goes in develops gluten; keep that stage brief and rely on the stiff whites for lightness.
- The whitesEight whites is a great deal of aeration and no yolk at all, which is what gives this cake its white crumb. Fold them in in two additions and stop while streaks are still faintly visible.
- SaltListed with no amount, as was common. A scant half teaspoon suits this quantity of flour and butter.
- Nut meatsUnspecified in the original; walnuts, pecans or hickory nuts would all suit. Broken by hand rather than chopped fine, so the pieces stay distinct in a pale crumb.
Lowney's Cook Book belongs to a genre that flourished around 1900: the cookbook published by a manufacturer to sell its own product. Walter M. Lowney's Boston chocolate company issued it with recipes calling for Lowney's products by name, a practice shared by Baker's, Fleischmann's and Royal Baking Powder in the same years. The recipe itself is a white cake, the kind built entirely on egg whites that became fashionable once reliable chemical leavening and cheap eggs made it practical for home bakers, here converted into individual cakes by the gem pan. Grated chocolate scattered through a white batter, rather than melted into it, was a common way to get chocolate flavor without sacrificing the pale crumb that was the point of the cake.