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Chocolate Loaf Cake
2 tablespoons butter or shortening 1 cup sugar 2 tablespoons grated chocolate 2 cups flour 2 teaspoons baking-powder 1 cup milk 2 cups seeded raisins 12 black walnut-meats 1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract Cream the butter or shortening; add the sugar and continue creaming. Melt the chocolate over hot water, and add. Mix and sift the flour and baking-powder and add alternately with the milk. Add the raisins, broken nut-meats well floured, and the flavoring. Mix well. Bake in a loaf pan 360 degrees F. for forty-five minutes. When cool, frost with boiled or chocolate frosting.
An eggless, butter-lean loaf that leans on baking powder and a heavy load of fruit and nuts for body. It behaves more like a fruited quick bread than a modern layer cake.
- No eggs, and that is deliberateThere is no egg in the list and none is missing. Cakes of this type were built for economy, and the crumb will be tender but coarse and quick to dry — plan to eat it within two days or wrap it tightly.
- The stated oven temperature360F is an unusually precise figure for a period recipe, of the kind that appears once ovens carry numbered dials. Set a modern oven to 350F and give it the full 45 minutes, then test with a skewer; the raisin weight can add 10 minutes.
- Grated chocolateThis means unsweetened baking chocolate grated from the block, roughly half an ounce for 2 tablespoons. It contributes colour and a faint bitterness rather than real chocolate flavour; use unsweetened chocolate, not cocoa powder or chips.
- Only 2 tablespoons of fatCreaming that little butter with a full cup of sugar will not go fluffy. Work it to a smooth paste and move on rather than beating in hope of volume.
- Black walnutsTwelve black walnut-meats is a quarter cup or so, depending on whether the original means twelve kernels or twelve pieces. Black walnuts are markedly stronger and more resinous than English walnuts and are usually sold shelled in pieces; English walnuts substitute if you want a milder loaf.
- Flouring the nuts and fruitTossing the broken nut-meats and raisins in a little of the measured flour keeps them from sinking through a thin batter. Do it with the raisins too, not just the nuts.
- Pan and yieldA 9x5-inch loaf pan, greased and lined on the bottom, is right for this quantity. It cuts into 10 to 12 slices.
- FrostingBoiled frosting is a sugar syrup beaten into egg white — meringue-based and best eaten the day it is made. A simple chocolate glaze keeps better on a loaf that will sit.
Loaf cakes like this one sit at the point where the American cake tradition met the modern chemical leaveners: no eggs, very little fat, a cup of milk, and two teaspoons of baking powder doing the leavening work that beaten eggs once did. The Delineator was a Butterick publication whose recipe pages ran to thrifty household cooking. Black walnuts, called for here without comment, were more often gathered than purchased across much of the eastern and midwestern United States.