Chocolate Cake
Yolks two eggs, 1/2 cup milk, 2 sqs. chocolate; boil together till thick paste. Butter size of small egg, cup sugar, cream together, 1/2 cup sweet milk with 1 tsp. soda; 1 tsp. vanilla. Stir first mixture in hot. 1½ cups of flour. Cover with boiled frosting.
— Mrs. Mae Hammond
A compact devil's food formula of the sort common in early twentieth-century church cookbooks: a cooked chocolate custard base stirred hot into a creamed batter. The instructions assume you already know how a cake goes together, so the gaps are in equipment and quantities rather than technique.
- Two squares of chocolateBaking chocolate was sold in scored cakes of one-ounce squares, and it meant unsweetened chocolate. Use 2 oz unsweetened, chopped; a modern sweet or semisweet bar will make the cake cloying and slack.
- Butter the size of a small eggReckon this at about 2 oz, or 4 tablespoons. Butter was cut from a larger mass and judged by eye, so anything from 3 to 5 tablespoons is within the spirit of it.
- The cooked baseYolks, milk and chocolate cooked to a thick paste. Despite the recipe's word 'boil,' this behaves as a custard rather than a syrup, so keep it over low or moderate heat and stir constantly; hard boiling risks curdling the yolks and leaving the paste grainy.
- Stir first mixture in hotThis is the hinge. Adding the chocolate paste while still hot melts the butter slightly and starts the soda working, so have the pans greased and the oven at temperature before you begin, and get the batter in promptly. The dark reddish tone comes from the soda reacting with the chocolate rather than from the heat itself.
- Soda and no acidA teaspoon of soda dissolved in sweet milk with no vinegar, buttermilk or cream of tartar looks like an error but is not: unsweetened chocolate is acidic enough to react with it. A full teaspoon is generous for 1 1/2 cups of flour, and 3/4 teaspoon gives a cleaner flavor with less soapy aftertaste.
- FlourUse plain all-purpose flour; the recipe supplies its own leavening. Self-rising flour will push the cake over.
- Oven and pansNo temperature is given, as was usual in books of this kind before oven thermostats were common. Bake at 350F. The quantity fills two 8-inch layers (about 20 minutes) or one 8-inch square (30 to 35 minutes).
- Boiled frostingA hot sugar syrup beaten into whipped egg white; close kin to the modern seven-minute frosting, though that one is beaten over heat rather than made with a separately boiled syrup. It sets with a thin crust and does not keep well, so frost the day it is served.
- YieldA modest cake, eight to ten servings.
Cookbooks like this one were compiled and sold by church women's groups — a Philathea class was an adult Bible-study class for young women, part of a movement that spread through Baptist and other Protestant congregations in the early 1900s — and the recipes came in signed by name, as this one did from Mrs. Mae Hammond. The style tells you a good deal about the audience: no oven temperature, no pan size, no baking time, because every contributor assumed the reader kept house and needed only the proportions. The cake itself belongs to the devil's food family that took hold in American home baking around the turn of the twentieth century; the cooked chocolate-and-yolk base is often said to have drawn more color and flavor from a small amount of chocolate, and the soda reacting with the acidic chocolate is generally credited with the reddish cast that later gave red velvet cake its name.