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Simple Chocolate Cake
3 eggs ½ cup sugar teaspoon salt cup Lowney's Cocoa teaspoon vanilla grated rind and juice of lemon 1 tablespoon flour teaspoon cinnamon teaspoon baking powder + teaspoon clove Mix cocoa, spice, flour, baking powder, and salt; beat the yolks of eggs until lemon-colored and thick; add sugar and beat well; add lemon juice and rind; when well blended, add chocolate mixture and the beaten whites of eggs. Bake in buttered shallow pans twenty minutes in a moderate oven. When cool put together with chocolate frosting or currant jelly or White Mountain Cream. 6 eggs 3 cups sugar
A nearly flourless cocoa sponge — one tablespoon of flour for three eggs — which means it rises on beaten whites alone and bakes fast. The transcription has lost most of its fractions, so treat the quantities as a guide rather than gospel.
- Missing fractionsThe original printing gave fractional amounts that have dropped out of this text: the salt, vanilla, cinnamon, clove and baking powder were almost certainly fractions of a teaspoon, and the cocoa a fraction of a cup. The spices in a cake of this size would run around ¼ teaspoon cinnamon and a pinch of clove, but the cocoa quantity is genuinely ambiguous and cannot be reconstructed with confidence.
- The stray line at the end"6 eggs 3 cups sugar" does not belong to this recipe, which already calls for three eggs; it appears to be a fragment of another recipe caught by the transcription. Ignore it.
- Moderate oven350F. Twenty minutes is right for thin layers in shallow pans; check at fifteen, since a cake with a tablespoon of flour dries out quickly.
- Shallow pans"shallow" here means layer-cake depth, not a sheet pan, since the layers are afterwards "put together" with a filling. The original directs only that the pans be buttered, and gives no size; the batter is small, so choose pans it will fill without spreading too thin.
- Cocoa, not chocolateThe "chocolate mixture" in the method is simply the dry cocoa and spices. Unsweetened natural cocoa is the closer match to what Lowney's was selling; Dutch-process will read flatter in flavour. The leavening here is baking powder, which works with either.
- Folding is the hingeThere is almost no flour to build structure, so the beaten whites are the entire lift. Beat them to soft-firm peaks and fold in two additions with a light hand — deflate them and you get a dense, damp disc.
- Lemon with chocolateThe grated rind and juice of the lemon (the printing may have specified a fraction of one, as elsewhere in the list) are assertive and deliberate; the acid sharpens the cocoa. If it reads oddly to you, keep the rind and halve the juice rather than dropping the acid entirely.
- FillingsWhite Mountain Cream is the period's boiled-sugar-and-egg-white frosting, essentially a soft meringue icing. Currant jelly is the simplest option and suits the lemon well.
- YieldTwo thin layers; eight small servings. This is a teatime cake, not a tall celebration cake.
Lowney's Cook Book was published by the Walter M. Lowney Company of Boston, one of the large American chocolate and cocoa manufacturers of the turn of the century, and like Baker's and Hershey's promotional books of the same era it exists to persuade households that cocoa belongs in everyday baking rather than only in a cup. That commercial purpose shows in the recipe's structure: the cocoa is treated as a dry ingredient sifted with the flour and leavening, rather than as melted block chocolate, which earlier cake recipes more often called for. The lemon and warm spices are a holdover from an older sensibility, when chocolate was routinely partnered with cinnamon and clove rather than expected to stand alone, a pairing generally traced back to the spiced chocolate drinks of colonial Spanish America. The near-absence of flour puts this in the family of sponge and "torte" cakes that Anglo-American books of the 1890s and 1900s borrowed from Continental baking.