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Devil's Food or Chocolate
2 eggs beaten separately. 2 cups sugar. 3 cups flour. 1 cup buttermilk. 1/4 cake chocolate. 1/2 cup butter. 1 teaspoon soda dissolved in milk. 1 teaspoon baking powder. Flavor with vanilla.
An ingredient list rather than a method, which was normal for cake formulas of this period: the writer assumed the reader knew the creaming order and could judge her own oven. What follows fills in the gaps.
- The chocolate measure"1/4 cake chocolate" refers to a block of unsweetened baking chocolate, commonly sold in 8-ounce cakes scored into 1-ounce squares, so a quarter cake is about 2 ounces. This is genuinely approximate; brands and cake sizes varied, and anything from 2 to 4 ounces will produce a workable cake.
- Order of workCream the butter and sugar, beat in the egg yolks, then add the melted chocolate. Add the flour alternately with the buttermilk holding the dissolved soda, and fold the stiffly beaten whites in last.
- "Beaten separately"Beating the whites apart and folding them in rather than stirring adds lift alongside the soda and baking powder. With only two eggs to three cups of flour, though, they supplement the chemical leavening rather than supply most of it.
- Soda and buttermilkThe teaspoon of soda is there to neutralise the buttermilk's acidity; the baking powder does the remaining lifting. Do not substitute sweet milk for the buttermilk without dropping the soda, or the crumb will taste soapy.
- OvenThe recipe gives no oven direction. In a modern oven 350F is a reasonable choice: two 9-inch layers take 25 to 30 minutes, a single 9x13 pan 35 to 40.
- Batter consistencyThree cups of flour to one cup of buttermilk gives a very stiff batter by modern standards. Some period devil's food recipes direct that the melted chocolate be thinned with a few tablespoons of boiling water before it goes in, which both loosens the batter and deepens the colour.
- Yield and finishingEnough for two 9-inch layers, serving 10 to 12. The recipe gives no frosting; a boiled white icing or a plain chocolate fudge frosting is what would have gone on it.
- FilingThe page is printed under "Vegetables"; the reason for the placement is unclear.
Devil's food appears in American cookbooks around the turn of the twentieth century, and is usually said to have been named in opposition to angel food cake: dark, dense and butter-rich where the other is white, airy and fatless. The reddish cast that gave the cake part of its reputation comes from the reaction between natural, non-alkalised cocoa and baking soda, the same chemistry behind red velvet, and it was more pronounced in the period before Dutch-process chocolate became common in home baking. Mary A. Wilson wrote for the Ladies' Home Journal and built her reputation on wartime food economy.