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Chocolate Nut Cake
⅔ cup butter or shortening
1 teaspoon cinnamon
2 cups sugar
½ teaspoon mace
4 eggs
½ teaspoon grated nutmeg
1 cup mashed potatoes
½ teaspoon ground cloves
2 squares chocolate
1 cup chopped nut-meats
2 cups flour
½ cup milk
3½ teaspoons baking-powder
Cream the butter or shortening and one cup of sugar. In another bowl, beat the egg-yolks with the remaining cup of sugar. Combine the two mixtures. Have ready the hot mashed potatoes, which should be without lumps, add to them the melted chocolate and combine with the first mixture. Mix and sift the dry ingredients and add the nut-meats. Add to the cake mixture, alternating with the milk. Fold in the stiffly beaten whites. Bake in a loaf pan in a moderate oven (380° F.). When cool, cover with marshmallow frosting or boiled frosting. This is a large moist cake, which will keep well.
A mashed-potato cake: the potato is there for moisture and keeping quality, not flavour. Two things decide whether it works — the potato must be freshly cooked, hot and absolutely smooth, and the batter is far too large for one ordinary loaf pan.
- The potatoUse plain boiled or baked russet, mashed or riced with no butter, milk, salt or seasoning added. It must be hot when the melted chocolate goes in, and lump-free; cold or gluey potato leaves dense streaks through the crumb. Rice it rather than mash it if you can.
- "2 squares chocolate"A square is 1 ounce of unsweetened baking chocolate, so 2 oz total. Not semisweet — the recipe already carries 2 cups of sugar.
- Oven temperature380°F is a real number and reflects the period's fondness for odd settings; 350°F in a modern oven is close enough and safer for a deep cake. Expect 60 to 75 minutes for a large loaf, tested with a skewer in the centre.
- Pan sizeThe measured ingredients come to roughly 8 to 9 cups of batter. Divide it between two 9x5-inch loaf pans, or use a 10-inch tube pan; a single loaf pan will overflow or bake with a raw seam.
- Baking powder3½ teaspoons is high by current standards. Two and a half teaspoons is ample for 2 cups of flour, especially with beaten whites already in the batter.
- Nut-meatsSimply shelled nuts. Walnuts, hickory nuts or pecans all suit the spice; toast and cool them first, and toss them with the sifted flour as directed so they stay suspended.
- Folding the whitesBeat the whites stiff but not dry and fold them in last, after the flour and milk. The batter is heavy, so fold in thirds rather than all at once or you will knock out the air you just added.
- Yield and frostingIf divided between two pans, two loaves; the recipe itself gives no yield. Boiled frosting is a hot sugar syrup beaten into egg whites -- meringue-style -- and it sets firm; a plain seven-minute frosting or a chocolate glaze does the same job with less fuss.
Potato cakes of this kind were everywhere in American cookbooks and newspaper columns from the 1890s through the 1920s, usually paired with chocolate and warm spices — cinnamon, mace, nutmeg, cloves — the same quartet used in a fruitcake. Potato starch holds water, and the recipe promises "a large moist cake, which will keep well." Butterick, better known for dress patterns, also published household books. The vogue is often traced to the wave of mashed-potato and potato-flour baking that followed wheat conservation efforts, though recipes of the type predate the First World War by a good twenty years.