Home › Cake › Inexpensive Chocolate Cake
Inexpensive Chocolate Cake
One cup sugar, butter or crisco 1/4 cup, 1 egg, 1 cup sour milk, 1 tsp. vanilla, 1/2 cups flour, 1/4 cup cocoa, pinch of salt, 1 tsp. soda. Sift dry ingredients together and beat well. Bake 30 minutes in a moderate oven. Powdered sugar flavored with vanilla and moistened with warm milk or cream in which a tiny bit of butter has been melted, makes an excellent frosting. cup
— Mrs. M. Howard Ferguson
1910 Chocolate Cake Cream 1/2 cup butter and 1/2 cups sugar. Beat in 2 eggs. Add 1/2 cup sour milk in which 1 teaspoonful of soda has been dissolved, 2 cups flour, and 1 teaspoonful of vanilla. Melt 2 squares of chocolate, stir in 1/2 cup of boiling water; when smooth stir into the cake batter while still hot a little at a time. Frost with white frosting flavored with vanilla.
— Mrs. E. Knight
Two cakes run together here, both leavened with soda and sour milk. The typesetting has dropped whole numbers from several fractions, so read the quantities with care before you start.
- The broken fractions"1/2 cups flour" against a cup of sugar and a cup of sour milk is far too little; the plural "cups" suggests a whole number was dropped, most likely 1 1/2. The same loss appears in the second recipe's "1/2 cups sugar" (probably 1 1/2 cups). Where a fraction is followed by the plural "cups," suspect a missing whole number.
- Moderate ovenTake it as about 350-375F. The first cake's 30 minutes would suit an 8-inch square or round pan; the second recipe gives no pan or baking time at all, so two 8-inch layers of 30-35 minutes is a modern guess rather than anything the book states.
- Sour milkNot spoiled milk but naturally soured raw milk, acidic enough to react with the soda. Buttermilk is the direct modern stand-in; failing that, a tablespoon of vinegar or lemon juice stirred into a cup of whole milk and left ten minutes.
- The soda is the whole leaveningThere is no baking powder in either cake. Get the batter into the pan promptly once the soda meets the acid, and do not let it stand on the counter.
- CriscoOffered as an alternative to butter; the product was not on the market until 1911, so its presence dates this recipe no earlier than that. Modern shortening works the same way; butter gives better flavour.
- Squares of chocolateA square meant one ounce of unsweetened baking chocolate, not sweetened chips. Two squares is two ounces; blooming it in boiling water, as directed, deepens the colour and flavour.
- Cocoa in the first cake1/4 cup of cocoa gives a light chocolate crumb rather than a dark one. Natural (non-alkalised) cocoa is what a recipe of this date assumes, though the acid the soda needs is supplied mainly by the cup of sour milk, so Dutch-process would be a modest change rather than a ruinous one.
- The frostingA plain vanilla glace: powdered sugar loosened with warm milk or cream and a little melted butter. Add the liquid a teaspoon at a time, as it goes from stiff to runny very quickly. Roughly 1 1/2 cups sugar covers a single-layer cake.
- YieldNeither recipe states one. On the pan sizes suggested above, reckon roughly 8 or 9 from the first and 10 to 12 from the second.
Church and society cook books of this period are full of "inexpensive" cakes, and the word tends to mean much the same cluster of economies: one egg instead of two or three, a quarter cup of fat instead of a half, and cocoa powder rather than the costlier block chocolate. Sour milk cake belongs to the same economy, a way of using milk that had turned on a farm or in an unrefrigerated pantry, with soda to neutralise the acid and lift the crumb. The mention of Crisco dates the page closely, as the product reached American kitchens in 1911; the second recipe still assumes butter and squares of chocolate. Recipes here are credited to the women who contributed them, which is the defining habit of the compiled community cook book: the book is a roster of a congregation as much as a set of instructions.