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Chocolate Layer Cake
Grate one cake of unsweetened chocolate, add four tablespoonfuls flour, two teaspoonfuls baking powder, one cupful of sugar, five eggs beaten with the sugar. Beat all fifteen minutes and bake in layers.
Filling-One cupful of milk, one heaping teaspoonful of corn starch, mixed smooth in milk. Beat 3 eggs separately, add yolks to cup of milk, add 2 teaspoonfuls of vanilla extract. When warm, add butter the size of a hickory nut and one-half cupful of sugar. in the beaten whites when cool.
A flourless-in-all-but-name sponge: five eggs, a cup of sugar, four tablespoons of flour and grated chocolate, with no butter and no liquid in the batter. It depends entirely on how much air you beat into the eggs.
- "One cake of chocolate"Unsweetened baking chocolate was sold as a block, often a half pound, scored into small squares of about an ounce. Period recipes use "cake" loosely for both the whole block and a single square, so the quantity here is genuinely ambiguous; an ounce or two is the workable reading for this batter.
- Grating vs. meltingGrate the chocolate finely and keep it dry rather than melting it. Melted chocolate would slacken the egg foam, which does much of the lifting here alongside the baking powder.
- Fifteen minutes of beatingThat is a hand-whisk instruction. With a stand mixer, five to eight minutes on high with the whisk attachment will bring eggs and sugar to the pale, thick ribbon stage. Fold the flour, baking powder and chocolate in by hand at the end.
- Oven and pansThe recipe gives no temperature and no pan size; a moderate oven, around 350F, suits it. The batter will make two thin 8-inch layers; check from about 12 minutes, until the tops spring back. Thin egg-foam layers overbake fast and turn dry.
- The filling is a stirred custardThe recipe never says to cook it, but it must be. Combine the cornstarch with the cold milk, add the yolks, and cook over low heat, stirring constantly, until it thickens and coats a spoon. Do not let it boil hard or the yolks will curdle.
- "Butter the size of a hickory nut"Roughly two teaspoons. The recipe stirs it in with the sugar while the custard is still warm; the vanilla goes in earlier, with the yolks and milk.
- The raw whitesThe line is garbled; it means fold in the beaten whites once the custard is cool. Those whites are never cooked, so use pasteurized whites if you are serving anyone who should avoid raw egg. The filling is perishable and belongs in the refrigerator.
- YieldTwo layers, serving eight to ten. The custard filling means the assembled cake keeps only a day or two, chilled.
Bride's cookbooks of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were wedding-gift books, aimed at a woman setting up a kitchen for the first time, and their cake chapters lean on commercial baking powder and boxed baking chocolate sold in scored blocks. Layer cakes are usually linked to the spread of cheap stamped tinware -- shallow round pans made a cake that could be split and filled rather than served as a single loaf -- and by the end of the century a filled two- or three-layer cake was common company fare. Note that the chocolate here is in the cake and the filling is a plain vanilla custard, the reverse of the modern default; the terse, telegraphic style, with steps like cooking the custard simply assumed, is typical of the period.