Marble Cake
1 cup butter 2 cups powdered sugar 4 eggs 3 cups flour 1 cup sweet milk 2 teaspoons baking powder 1 square unsweetened chocolate Beat the butter and sugar to a cream; add the yolks of the eggs, then the sifted flour and baking powder alternately with the milk. Fold in the whites; take one third of the batter out and add to it the chocolate melted and thinned with a little hot water. Into the baking pan pour the yellow mixture to the depth of one inch; drop into this in two or three places a spoonful of the dark mixture, giving it a slight stir with the tip of a spoon and spreading it in broken circles around the dark mixture. Pour in more yellow batter, then more brown, proceeding in the same way until all the batter is used. Bake in a moderate oven.
A straightforward creamed butter cake split into two batters. The only real skill is in the layering, and a couple of the ingredient names mean something different now than they did when this was written.
- "Powdered sugar"In American cookbooks of this era powdered sugar generally means finely ground granulated sugar, not the cornstarch-laced confectioners' sugar sold today. Ordinary granulated sugar is the right substitute, though 2 cups granulated is somewhat more sugar by weight than 2 cups of the finer old-style powdered.
- "Sweet milk"Simply fresh milk, as opposed to the sour or buttermilk called for in soda-leavened cakes. Whole milk is the right substitute.
- A square of chocolateA square of unsweetened baking chocolate is conventionally taken as 1 ounce, though modern packaging varies. Melt it and slacken it with a tablespoon or so of hot water so it will ribbon rather than seize into the cool batter.
- Moderate ovenConventionally read as about 350 to 375F. A tube pan or two 9-inch loaf pans would suit this quantity; expect roughly 50 to 60 minutes for a tube pan and rather less for loaves, but the recipe gives no time or pan.
- The hinge: barely stirThe marbling depends on restraint. One short pull with the tip of a spoon through each spoonful of dark batter is enough; a second pass turns the whole cake an even mud color.
- Batter consistencyThree cups flour to one cup milk gives a thick batter, though the recipe's own instruction to "pour" it into the pan shows it is still pourable. Do not slacken it further, or the two colors will merge.
- Folding the whitesBeat the whites to soft peaks, not stiff and dry, and fold them in last with as few strokes as will incorporate them. The baking powder is doing most of the lifting; the whites are for texture.
- YieldRoughly enough for a 10-inch tube pan, perhaps 12 to 16 servings, though the recipe specifies neither. It gives no frosting or finish.
Marble cake belongs to a family of American "two-color" cakes that appear in printed collections from the mid-nineteenth century onward, and the earliest versions were not chocolate at all: the dark batter was darkened with molasses and warm spices, since baking chocolate was still an expensive specialty item. As cocoa and unsweetened chocolate became cheap and reliably available through the last decades of the 1800s, the spice version gave way to the chocolate one recorded here. The German Marmorkuchen is often cited as its ancestor, and the timing of its popularity in Pennsylvania and the Midwest makes that plausible, though the connection is traditional rather than firmly documented. The recipe's inclusion in a loose-leaf teaching collection like Mrs. Fryer's is telling: it is a single well-understood butter cake batter that demonstrates creaming, alternating dry and wet additions, and folding in whites, with a bit of showmanship at the end for no extra ingredients.