Chocolate Cake
Six sticks of chocolate, one and onehalf cups of sugar, five eggs, one cup of milk, two cups of flour, one-half cup each citron and almond chopped fine; teaspoon each of vanilla extract, cloves, cinnamon and nutmeg, two teaspoons baking powder; cream the butter and sugar, beat the whites and yolks of eggs separately; add the well beaten yolks to the cream butter and sugar; then add the milk and some of the flour; stir well and add the whites of the eggs, then the remainder of the flour, in which the baking powder has been sifted; add citron, blanched almonds, spice and flavoring last. Bake in a moderate oven and not less than one hour. An excellent loaf cake and, like fruit cake, improves with age.
A spiced loaf cake in the older style, closer to a fruit cake than to a modern layer cake. The ingredient list has a gap that has to be filled before you start.
- The missing butterButter is never listed, yet the method opens by creaming it. For a batter with two cups of flour and five eggs, work from about 1 cup (8 oz) of softened butter. Without it the cake is nothing like the "excellent loaf" promised.
- Six sticks of chocolateNineteenth-century baking chocolate was generally sold in cakes or sticks, often scored at roughly an ounce and usually unsweetened, though weights varied by maker. Six sticks probably means something in the region of 6 oz. Modern unsweetened bars are commonly divided into 1 oz squares, so six of those is a reasonable equivalent.
- Melting is not mentionedThe chocolate has no place in the written method. Melt it gently and let it cool to barely warm, then beat it into the creamed butter and sugar before the yolks go in; adding it hot will loosen the batter and scramble the eggs.
- Moderate ovenConventionally taken as somewhere around 325-350F. For a loaf this dense the lower end is safer over the long bake; the recipe itself says not less than an hour, and a full loaf pan may want 70 to 80 minutes. Test with a skewer at the centre.
- CitronCandied citron peel, still sold at holiday time and in Italian groceries. Chop it fine as directed; candied orange or lemon peel substitutes acceptably. Half a cup is a generous amount and it is what makes the cake read as fruit cake.
- Blanched almondsPour boiling water over whole almonds, stand a minute, and slip the skins off, then chop. Slivered blanched almonds from a packet do the same work with less effort.
- The spicing is heavyA teaspoon each of cloves, cinnamon and nutmeg in a two-cup batter is assertive by current taste. Cloves in particular dominate; half a teaspoon of cloves is a reasonable restraint if you want the chocolate to show.
- Pan and yieldOne 9x5-inch loaf pan, greased and lined, or two smaller ones. Cuts into 12 to 16 slices.
- Improving with ageSound advice, and it works here because of the sugar, fat and candied peel. Cool completely, wrap tightly, and keep two or three days before cutting; the spices settle and the crumb moistens.
Loaf cakes like this sit at the point where the old spiced fruit cake was meeting the newer taste for chocolate. Chocolate sold in pressed cakes and sticks made a measured quantity easy for home bakers to buy, and chocolate as a cake ingredient became noticeably more common in American recipe books over the nineteenth century, though earlier books treat chocolate largely as a drink. What is telling is that the author still builds the cake on a fruit-cake frame: citron, almonds, cloves, cinnamon and nutmeg, baked in a loaf and set aside to mellow. The chocolate is an addition to an existing form rather than the point of it. Whatever the cause, the omission of butter from the ingredient list is an unusually unhelpful lapse in a recipe otherwise written out step by step.