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Marble Cake WHITE PART
3 tablespoons shortening 1/2 cup sugar 1/2 teaspoon lemon extract 1/2 cup milk 1 cup flour 2 teaspoons Royal Baking Powder 1/4 teaspoon salt white of 1 egg Cream shortening; add sugar slowly; add flavoring and milk. Beat well and add flour which has been sifted with baking powder and salt. Mix in beaten white of egg.
DARK PART 3 tablespoons shortening 1/2 cup sugar yolk of 1 egg 1/2 cup milk 1 cup flour 2 teaspoons Royal Baking Powder 1/4 teaspoon salt 1/2 teaspoon cloves 1/2 teaspoon allspice 1 teaspoon cinnamon 6 teaspoons cocoa Cream shortening; add sugar slowly; add egg yolk and mix well. Mix in milk; add flour, baking powder, salt, spices and cocoa which have been sifted together. Put this batter by spoonfuls and the same amount of white batter alternately into greased loaf pan but do not mix. Bake in greased loaf pan, in moderate oven, about 45 minutes. Cover with white icing.
A two-batter loaf from a baking powder company's promotional book, straightforward apart from the unstated oven temperature and the vague pan size.
- Oven temperatureThe book gives no figure; "moderate oven" is conventionally read as somewhere around 350-375F. At 45 minutes a loaf this size should be done or close to it; test with a skewer in the centre of both colours.
- Pan sizeThe two batters together make roughly 4 cups, which suits a standard 8 1/2 x 4 1/2 inch loaf pan. A 9 x 5 pan will give a flatter loaf that may bake somewhat faster.
- ShorteningIn 1920s usage this means any solid fat: lard, vegetable shortening or butter. Butter gives better flavour; if you use it, soften rather than melt it so it creams properly.
- Baking powder quantityTwo teaspoons per cup of flour is high by current standards, as you would expect from a book published to sell baking powder. Reducing each part to 1 1/4 teaspoons gives a less coarse crumb and less aftertaste.
- CocoaSix teaspoons is two tablespoons. Cocoa in American home kitchens of this period was usually natural (non-alkalised), though Dutch-process was available; Dutch-process works but shifts the colour darker and mutes the spice slightly.
- MarblingThe instruction not to mix is the hinge. Drop alternating spoonfuls and leave them; the recipe asks for no swirling at all, and a knife drawn through more than once or twice will blend the two batters into a uniform brown.
- The split eggOne egg serves both batters, white in the light and yolk in the dark. Beat the white to soft peaks and fold it in last so it is not knocked flat.
- YieldOne loaf, about 10 to 12 slices. The book does not specify what the white icing is; a simple confectioners' sugar and water or milk glaze would serve.
Marble cake is generally traced to German-speaking households, where Marmorkuchen was established well before its American appearances, and by the mid-nineteenth century it appears in English-language books as a light-and-dark loaf. Early versions took their dark colour from molasses and spices rather than chocolate; the cocoa here is often connected to the falling price of chocolate and the spread of packaged cocoa powder around the turn of the century, though the cloves, allspice and cinnamon are a holdover from the older molasses-spice style. The recipe's real purpose in this book is arithmetic: two teaspoons of Royal Baking Powder per cup of flour, repeated across both halves, is the sort of proportion a manufacturer's cookbook existed to normalise. Such books were given away or sold cheaply through the 1910s and 1920s and did a great deal to fix American home baking in cup measures and standardised chemical leavening.