Devil Cake
For the custard part: One cup of grated chocolate, one cup of brown sugar, a half cup of sweet milk, yolk of one egg and a teaspoonful of vanilla. stir all together in a granite saucepan; cook slowly and set away to cool.
For the cake part: One cup brown sugar, two cups flour, a half cup of butter, half cup of sweet milk and two eggs. Cream the butter, sugar and yolks of eggs, add milk, sifted flour and whites of eggs, beaten stiff; beat all together, then stir in the custard, lastly adding one teaspoonful soda, dissolved in a very little warm water. Bake in jelly' tins.
The Filling: Two cups of sugar, ten tablespoonfuls of hot water, one-half teaspoonful of cream tartar; boil until thick. Put in thirty-two marshmallows; boil up again, then stir in the beaten whites of three eggs; when almost cool stir in one cupful of chopped walnuts, beat until cold, then spread between layers an inch deep. This is delicious and will keep indefinitely.
A three-part layer cake typical of turn-of-the-century American baking: a cooked chocolate paste folded into a butter batter, then a boiled marshmallow frosting. Nothing here is difficult, but the original omits pan sizes, oven heat and every time.
- Grated chocolateGrated chocolate here most likely means unsweetened block chocolate, grated on a box grater — not cocoa powder and not chips. A cup of gratings is roughly 4 oz by weight; chop and melt an equal weight of unsweetened baking chocolate instead.
- Granite saucepanGranite ware is enamelled steel, and so non-reactive, though the recipe may simply be naming the commonest saucepan of the day. Any non-reactive pan works. Cook the custard over low heat, stirring, only until it thickens to a glossy paste; keep it below a simmer so the yolk does not scramble.
- Sweet milkPlain whole milk, named to distinguish it from the sour milk or buttermilk often paired with soda in cakes of the period.
- The sodaOne teaspoon of baking soda with no acid ingredient beyond brown sugar and chocolate is the hinge of the recipe. Dissolve it in a teaspoon of warm water, stir it in at the very end, and get the pans into the oven at once.
- Jelly tins and oven heatJelly-cake tins are shallow round layer pans, 8 or 9 inches. This batter will fill two or three of them thinly. No temperature is given: bake at 350F for 18 to 25 minutes, until the centres spring back.
- Boil until thickThe filling is made like an Italian meringue: hot syrup beaten into whites. "Thick" here is about the soft-ball stage, 238-240F on a thermometer — a point the original cook would have judged without one.
- Thirty-two marshmallowsThirty-two marshmallows is roughly 8 oz of modern large marshmallows (early commercial ones may have been smaller and denser); weigh rather than count, and use large marshmallows or about four cups of miniatures. They are there for body, so stir only until they dissolve.
- The egg whitesThe beaten whites go into hot syrup off the heat and are never cooked through. If that matters in your household, use pasteurized whites.
- Yield and keepingOne three-layer cake, twelve to sixteen slices. The claim that it "will keep indefinitely" reflects a sugar-saturated frosting in a cold pantry; in practice expect a few days, covered, before the marshmallow layer softens or weeps.
Devil cake — later devil's food — appears in American community and household cookbooks from around the turn of the century, and the name is generally read as the dark, rich answer to the pale, fat-free angel food cake that was fashionable at the same moment. Unsweetened chocolate and baking soda together shift the crumb toward mahogany-red. The boiled marshmallow-and-walnut filling dates the recipe fairly closely, since marshmallows became a cheap grocery item in the United States around the turn of the century, and cookbooks of the period fold them into frostings, fudges and salads with the enthusiasm of a new convenience.