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Chocolate Cakes
2 cups sugar. 1/2 cup butter. 2 eggs. 1 cup grated chocolate 2 cups flour 1/2 teaspoon vanilla Beat the butter and sugar to a cream; add the yolks of the eggs and the chocolate (melted by standing over hot water); then add alternately the flour and the well-beaten whites of the eggs. Add the flavoring; work the mixture well and roll it in long narrow pieces. Roll these in granulated sugar and bake them on pans dusted with flour. If the cakes spread and crack open like macaroons they are right.
A crackle-topped chocolate cookie in the old style, rolled in sugar so the surface splits as it spreads. The printed ingredient list here is incomplete, which is the first thing to deal with.
- The missing quantitiesOnly chocolate, flour and vanilla are listed, yet the method calls for butter, sugar and separated eggs. Lines appear to have dropped out of the printed list; how is not recoverable from the page. A cookie dough of this type would plausibly take something in the region of 1/2 cup butter, 1 to 1 1/2 cups sugar and 3 eggs to 2 cups flour, but treat any figure as a reconstruction rather than the author's.
- Grated chocolateMost likely unsweetened block chocolate, grated so it would melt evenly, though sweetened cake chocolate was also sold in grateable blocks. A cup grated is roughly 4 oz. Modern unsweetened baking chocolate is the nearest equivalent; chips are sweetened and will throw the sugar balance further off.
- Melted by standing over hot waterA bain-marie, not direct heat, which keeps the chocolate from catching and seizing. Let it cool to barely warm before it meets the yolks, or the eggs will set in threads.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given. Small rich cookies of this sort belong in a moderate oven, 350F, for 10 to 12 minutes; they should still look soft at the centre when the top has cracked.
- Roll it in long narrow piecesThe dough is shaped into ropes, cut, then rolled in granulated sugar. It is likely to be sticky at room temperature, and a short chill will make it easier to handle.
- Pans dusted with flourFlouring bare sheets was ordinary practice before parchment. Parchment or a silicone mat does the same job with less risk of the sugar coating catching.
- The test at the end"Spread and crack open like macaroons" is the recipe's own measure of success: the cakes are meant to flatten and split, not stay domed and smooth.
- YieldNot stated, and not recoverable, since the quantities are missing. On the reconstructed proportions it might come to something like three dozen small cakes.
The cookie itself belongs to the family of sugar-rolled chocolate crackle cookies that turn up under many names in American baking; the sugar coating dries on the surface as the dough rises and spreads, so the crust fractures into the pale fissures the recipe compares to macaroons. Grated chocolate rather than cocoa points to a kitchen buying chocolate in hard unsweetened cakes, which had to be grated or shaved before it would melt smoothly — an ordinary chore in a household of this period.