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Chocolate Powder (Yolks of eggs cup sugar whites)
yolks of 3 eggs 1 cup sugar whites of 3 eggs 2 tablespoons hot water teaspoon salt 1/4 cup pastry flour 1 teaspoon vanilla Beat yolks until lemon-colored and thick; add sugar and continue beating. Mix chocolate with water, add to sugar mixture; cut and fold in flour, salt and beaten whites. Flavor and bake in buttered pan in a moderate oven three quarters of an hour. See colored illustration, Plate X, opposite.
A butterless sponge cake leavened entirely by beaten eggs, from a chocolate company's promotional cookbook. The transcription has lost several fractions, so read the quantities carefully before starting.
- Missing quantitiesThe text as printed gives no amount at all for the chocolate powder, and the salt and flour lines have lost their fractions. Treat all three amounts as unverified rather than guessing precisely.
- What "chocolate powder" meansWhat 'chocolate powder' means -- Read here as a dry powdered cocoa rather than melted baking chocolate: the title says powder, and it is worked to a paste with the hot water. Modern unsweetened cocoa is the nearest equivalent. Whether Lowney's 'chocolate powder' was sweetened, and whether it was alkalised, is not established by the recipe itself.
- Moderate ovenRoughly 350F; 'moderate' in books of this date covers something like 325-375F. A sponge with no chemical leavening will not tolerate a hot oven — the crust sets before the egg foam has finished expanding and the centre sinks.
- Pastry flourLow-protein soft-wheat flour, roughly the modern cake flour. All-purpose will give a tougher, drier crumb; removing two tablespoons of all-purpose flour per cup and replacing them with cornstarch brings it closer.
- The hinge is the foldingThere is no baking powder here. Beat the yolks until genuinely thick and pale, whip the whites to soft peaks, and cut and fold rather than stir — the phrase in the original is literal. Deflate the foam and you get a flat, rubbery slab.
- Pan and timingForty-five minutes suits a deep 8-inch square or a loaf-shaped pan. In a shallow sheet the cake will be done in half that. Test with a skewer and by the cake pulling slightly from the sides.
- Butter the pan, not the sidesThe original simply says 'buttered pan'. Note that sponge batters generally climb better on an ungreased side wall, so buttering the base and lining it with parchment is a reasonable compromise for release.
- YieldAbout eight servings. It is dry by modern standards and takes well to whipped cream, a fruit sauce, or a chocolate frosting.
Lowney's Cook Book was compiled by Maria Willett Howard and issued by the Walter M. Lowney Company of Boston, a chocolate manufacturer that grew out of the late nineteenth-century New England confectionery trade. Books of this kind were advertising in domestic dress: every dessert chapter finds another use for the firm's cocoa, chocolate powder and premium bars, and the colored plates referenced in the text — "See colored illustration, Plate X" — were an expensive selling point. The cake itself belongs to the American sponge tradition, a lineage of eggs-only cakes that predates reliable chemical leavening and survived alongside it because the crumb is finer; adding cocoa to that formula was a natural way for a chocolate house to fold its product into an established cake.