No Egg Cake
One cup sugar, 1/2 cup sour milk, 1/4 cup soft butter, 1 tsp. vanilla, 1 level tsp. soda, 2 heaping tbsp. cocoa dissolved in 1/2 cup boiling water. Let boil until thick. 134 cups flour, little salt, 1 heaping tsp. Royal baking powder.
— Mrs. Robert J. Northridge
A wartime-style eggless chocolate cake, leavened twice over: soda against sour milk, plus baking powder for insurance. The method is compressed almost to nothing, so the order of operations matters more than the quantities.
- The flour quantityThe flour reads as "134 cups," which is not a usable figure. For a cake with one cup of sugar and one cup of total liquid, 1 3/4 cups is the proportion that works; treat it as an informed reading rather than what the page states.
- Sour milkThis means naturally soured raw milk, which no longer exists in a carton. Use buttermilk, or stir 1 1/2 tsp lemon juice or vinegar into 1/2 cup whole milk and let it stand five minutes. The acid is structural here, not flavour: it is what activates the soda.
- The cocoa stepWhisk the cocoa into the boiling water and let it bubble briefly until it thickens to a loose paste, then cool it before it meets the soda and sour milk. Adding it scalding hot will fire off the soda in the bowl instead of in the oven.
- Cocoa typeUse natural unsweetened cocoa, not Dutch-process. Dutched cocoa is alkalised and will leave the soda with nothing to react against beyond the sour milk, giving a flatter, soapier crumb.
- Mixing orderCream sugar and soft butter, add vanilla, then alternate the soured milk with the flour, salt and baking powder, and fold in the cooled cocoa paste last. Get it into the pan promptly once the soda is wet.
- Pan and ovenThe recipe gives no pan or oven direction. A batter of this size suits one 8-inch square or round pan, greased and floured; a modern equivalent would be roughly 350F for about 30 to 35 minutes, until a skewer comes out clean and the top springs back.
- Texture to expectWith no egg the crumb is tender and slightly fudgy rather than springy, and it stales quickly. Keep it covered and eat within a couple of days, or ice it -- though the recipe itself says nothing about icing.
- YieldOne modest single-layer cake, eight to nine squares.
Eggless, milkless or butterless cakes fill the cake chapters of American church and society cookbooks from the 1910s onward, when eggs were seasonally scarce and expensive; recipes of this kind were also a staple of First World War thrift cookery, though the formal conservation campaigns of the period centred on wheat, sugar, fats and meat rather than eggs. Chocolate was a common disguise: cocoa boiled to a paste supplies both colour and enough body to cover for the missing egg, while sour milk and soda do the lifting. Philathea cook books, where this belongs, were compiled by Philathea classes, the adult women's Sunday-school and Bible-study groups organised from 1893 as the companion to the Baraca movement begun in Syracuse, New York, in 1890, and sold to raise money for the class or the church, which is why so many entries carry a contributor's married name. The explicit call for Royal baking powder is a period fingerprint too: Royal was a cream-of-tartar powder, and its advertising long insisted that cream-of-tartar powders were the only trustworthy kind.