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Chocolate Raisin Cake
2 tablespoons sherry or brandy 2 squares Lowney's Premium Chocolate, grated teaspoon cinnamon 2 cups seeded raisins 3½ cups flour 3 teaspoons baking powder 5 egg whites Cream butter; add sugar gradually, grated chocolate, raisins, cinnamon, baking powder and salt sifted with flour, milk. Beat well; add flavoring and well-beaten whites of eggs. Bake in deep buttered pans, forty minutes. This amount will make two loaves. The wine or brandy may be omitted, in which case, use one cup of milk instead of three fourths cup. 1 cup butter 1 cup sugar 5 egg yolks 5 egg whites
The ingredient list as printed is scrambled and incomplete — a common casualty of columnar typesetting — so read it against the method before you start. Everything the method calls for is here except the milk and salt, which have to be inferred from the closing note.
- The missing milkThe final line tells you to use one cup of milk if the sherry is omitted, "instead of three fourths cup." So the recipe as written wants ¾ cup milk plus 2 tablespoons sherry or brandy. Salt is called for in the method but never quantified; ½ teaspoon suits this quantity of flour.
- The egg yolksFive yolks appear in the list but never in the method. Beat them into the creamed butter and sugar before the chocolate goes in; the whites are folded in last, as directed.
- Lowney's Premium ChocolateUnsweetened baking chocolate, sold in squares of roughly an ounce; the modern equivalent is any 100% cacao baking bar. Grate it rather than melting it, as the recipe directs.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given. Bake at about 350F for the stated forty minutes; deep loaf pans of this size may want closer to fifty minutes. Test with a skewer at the centre.
- Seeded raisinsThis meant raisins, generally muscatels, with the seeds removed, sold as a distinct product from "seedless." Ordinary dark raisins are the substitute; toss them with a spoonful of the measured flour to keep them from sinking.
- SweetnessOne cup of sugar against 3½ cups of flour makes a restrained, almost bread-like loaf that relies on the raisins for sweetness. Anyone expecting a modern chocolate cake should know this in advance rather than after.
- Folding the whitesThe whites are the only leavening beyond the baking powder in a batter this heavy. Fold them in with a light hand and get the pans into the oven promptly.
- YieldTwo loaves, as stated — figure two 8½ x 4½-inch pans, buttered and preferably lined on the base. Each loaf gives ten to twelve slices and keeps well wrapped for several days.
Lowney's Cook Book was issued by the Walter M. Lowney Company of Boston, a chocolate and cocoa manufacturer, and belongs to the large family of American cookbooks published to sell a branded ingredient. The cake itself sits in an older tradition than the fudgy layer cakes that came to dominate the century: it is essentially a rich fruited loaf, closer to a pound cake or a plain wedding cake, into which grated chocolate and cinnamon have been introduced as flavouring rather than as the main event. The optional spoonful of sherry or brandy is a holdover from nineteenth-century fruit-cake practice, where spirits both flavoured the crumb and helped the keeping qualities; the book's willingness to leave it out, with an adjustment to the milk, is often said to reflect a period when temperance sentiment made alcohol in baking a matter some households preferred to avoid, though the motive can only be guessed at.