Cocoa Cake
½ cup milk 1½ cups flour 2 teaspoons baking powder 1/4 teaspoon salt 1 teaspoon vanilla Mix in the order given and beat well for five minutes. Bake in buttered pan thirty to forty minutes in moderate oven.
The text as printed here is incomplete: the ingredient column breaks off after the milk, so the cocoa, sugar, fat and eggs that the title promises are missing. What survives is still worth reading for what it tells you about method and proportion, but it cannot be baked from as it stands without a full ingredient list from another source.
- The missing half of the listA cake built on 1½ cups flour and ½ cup milk in this era would typically carry roughly a cup of sugar, a quarter to a half cup of butter, one or two eggs, and a third to a half cup of cocoa. Those figures are the pattern of the period, not this recipe's own, so treat them as context rather than a reconstruction.
- Moderate ovenThe book gives no temperatures; 'moderate' is usually read today as somewhere around 350F. At that heat a single layer in an 8- or 9-inch pan may well be done before the stated forty minutes, while the longer end of the range would suit a deeper loaf-style pan and a range that held heat unevenly.
- Beat well for five minutesA hand-beating instruction, though by 1900 a rotary egg beater was as likely to be used as a spoon. With a stand mixer, two to three minutes on medium is likely to be ample, and prolonged beating once the flour is in risks a tougher crumb.
- Baking powderTwo teaspoons to 1.5 cups flour is a little generous by modern practice, which runs about 1 to 1.25 teaspoons per cup. Powders of the period varied in composition and timing of release, so a scant two teaspoons of modern powder is a reasonable reading.
- Cocoa in this bookCocoa -- American cocoas of this period were generally natural rather than Dutch-processed, and natural cocoa is mildly acidic. Note that this recipe leavens with baking powder, which carries its own acid, so cocoa acidity matters far less here than it would in a soda-leavened formula; substituting Dutch cocoa chiefly changes colour and flavour.
- Buttered panNo pan size is given. Buttering alone, buttering and flouring, and lining with paper were all in use at the time; a dusting of flour or cocoa over the butter, or a parchment round, will help a chocolate cake release.
- YieldA batter on 1½ cups of flour makes one 8-inch layer or a small loaf, serving six to eight.
Lowney's cookbooks were house publications of the Walter M. Lowney Company of Boston, a chocolate manufacturer, and like the Hershey's booklets that followed they existed to put cocoa into the hands of home bakers who had mostly used it as a drink. Cocoa cake as a category belongs to that campaign: chocolate baking before the 1890s generally meant melted unsweetened block chocolate, and the shift to powdered cocoa gave cooks a shelf-stable ingredient that could be sifted in with the flour instead of tempered over hot water. The plain, almost telegraphic instructions here are typical of the genre, which assumed a reader who already knew how a butter cake went together and needed only the proportions.