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Devil's Food Cake II
4 squares unsweetened chocolate 1/2 cup sugar 1/2 cup sugar 1/4 cup sour milk 1/2 cup sweet milk 1 egg Yolk 1 egg 1⅛ cups flour 1/4 cup butter ½ teaspoon soda 1/2 teaspoon vanilla Melt chocolate over hot water, add one-half cup sugar, and gradually sweet milk; then add yolk of egg, and cook gradually sweet milk; then add yolk of egg, and cook until mixture thickens.
Set aside to cool. Cream the butter, add gradually one-half cup sugar, egg well beaten, sour milk, and flour mixed and sifted with soda. Combine mixtures and add vanilla. Bake in shallow cake pans, and put between and on top boiled frosting. Add to filling onefourth cup raisins seeded and cut in pieces, if desired. ¼ cup butter ½ cup sugar Yolks 5 eggs
A two-part chocolate cake: a cooked chocolate custard-paste is made first, cooled, then folded into a creamed butter batter. Getting the first mixture properly cool is the whole trick.
- Cool the chocolate mixture completelyIf the cooked chocolate is still warm when it meets the creamed butter, the butter melts and the batter breaks, giving a greasy, dense crumb. Spread it in a shallow dish and let it come to room temperature, or chill it briefly and stir smooth.
- Unsweetened chocolate squaresA square in this period is 1 ounce, so 4 squares is 4 oz of unsweetened baking chocolate. Do not substitute semi-sweet or cocoa without adjusting sugar and fat.
- Sour milkNot spoiled milk but naturally soured, mildly acidic milk. Buttermilk is the modern stand-in; a quarter cup of whole milk with three-quarters of a teaspoon of lemon juice or vinegar, left five minutes, also works. The acid is what activates the soda.
- The soda quantity is ambiguousAs printed the leavening reads as 1 1/2 teaspoons, which is high for this volume of batter and would risk a soapy taste. Half a teaspoon of soda to a quarter cup of sour milk is a more usual proportion; treat the printed figure with suspicion.
- Flour amountThe flour line has lost its fraction. Devil's food batters of this style run to roughly 1 1/2 cups of flour for the fat and sugar given here. Use soft-wheat or all-purpose flour, sifted with the soda.
- Oven and pansThe recipe says only 'shallow cake pans', meaning layer pans; 8-inch rounds are a reasonable modern choice. No oven temperature is given; a moderate oven, about 350F, for 20 to 25 minutes, until a skewer comes out clean and the layers just pull from the sides.
- Boiled frostingThe frosting called for is the period's boiled or seven-minute icing: hot sugar syrup beaten into egg white. It sets firm and dries with a thin crust, so frost the cake the day it is served rather than storing it iced.
- YieldTwo thin layers; serves roughly 8 to 10.
Devil's food appeared in American cookbooks around the turn of the twentieth century, and the name is generally read as the dark counterpart to the pale, airy angel food cake that had become popular a couple of decades earlier. What distinguishes it from an ordinary chocolate cake is the use of soda with sour milk; where the soda is in excess of the acid, the alkalinity is usually said to shift the crumb toward reddish brown -- the effect later associated with red velvet. More than one version circulated, numbered in sequence; this one belongs to the more elaborate school in which the chocolate is first cooked with milk and egg yolk into a paste.