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Chocolate Loaf Cake
2 tablespoons butter or short- 2 teaspoons baking-powder ening
1 cup milk
1 cup sugar
2 cups seeded raisins
2 tablespoons grated chocolate
12 black walnut-meats
2 cups flour
½ teaspoon vanilla extract
Cream the butter or shortening; add the sugar and continue creaming. Melt the chocolate over hot water, and add. Mix and sift the flour and baking-powder and add alternately with the milk. Add the raisins, broken nut-meats well floured, and the flavoring. Mix well. Bake in a loaf pan 360° F. for fortyfive minutes. When cool, frost with boiled or chocolate frosting.
A plain eggless loaf that leans on raisins and black walnuts for richness rather than on chocolate, of which there is very little. A few notes before you start.
- No eggs, by designNo eggs — the recipe as printed contains none. Eggless baking-powder loaves were not unusual in early twentieth-century American cookbooks, and the crumb will be closer to a quick bread than to a butter cake. Adding an egg changes the batter's balance.
- That oven temperatureThe precise figure implies the book expected an oven thermometer. Set a modern oven to 350°F and check at 40 minutes with a skewer; 45 to 55 minutes is the realistic range for a full loaf.
- Pan sizeThe recipe says only 'a loaf pan'; a standard 9 by 5 inch pan, greased and floured or lined, suits this quantity. The batter is thick and heavily loaded with fruit, so level the top before it goes in.
- Grated chocolateThis means unsweetened block chocolate grated on a box grater, not cocoa powder and not chips. Two tablespoons grated is roughly half an ounce, so the chocolate is a flavor note rather than the body of the cake. Substituting cocoa powder will dry the crumb.
- Only 2 tablespoons of fatThat is a lean cake by modern standards, and the reason it will stale quickly. Eat it within two days or wrap it tightly; it improves with a day's rest but not with a week's.
- Seeded raisins"Seeded" meant the seeds had been removed, which was then a selling point. Any ordinary dark raisin works. Two cups is a heavy load for this quantity of batter, and flouring them along with the nuts keeps them from sinking.
- Black walnutsGenuine black walnuts are far stronger and more resinous than English walnuts and are still sold shelled, usually frozen. English walnuts will work but give a much milder cake. Twelve nut-meats is about a third of a cup broken.
- YieldOne loaf, twelve to fourteen slices. The boiled frosting the recipe suggests is a hot sugar syrup beaten into egg white; a plain chocolate glaze is less work and less sweet against the raisins.
Butterick, better known for dress patterns, published household books aimed at the same practical middle-class readership, and this is a loaf of a familiar kind: baked in a bread pan rather than in layers, and stretched with dried fruit and nuts. The eggless, low-butter formula was a thrifty habit that hardened into a style during the First World War, when American cooks were urged to save wheat, fat, sugar and meat for shipment to Europe, and eggless-butterless-milkless "war cakes" circulated widely. The black walnut is the other period marker: an American native gathered rather than farmed, common in home baking through the early twentieth century and now mostly a specialty item, prized for a flavor that is often said to survive being baked into a sweet batter.