Home › Cakes › Chocolate Sour-Milk Cake
Chocolate Sour-Milk Cake
½ cup butter or shortening
2 cups flour
1 cup sugar
½ teaspoon soda
3 eggs
⅓ cup hot water
½ cup sour milk
1 square chocolate
Cream butter or shortening and sugar; add eggs well beaten, and the milk. Add sifted flour. Dissolve the soda in the hot water and add grated chocolate to this mixture. Beat the mixture smooth and put in a well-greased loaf pan. Bake in a moderate oven (380° F.) for forty-five minutes.
A plain one-bowl-style loaf cake from the era when sour milk and soda did the leavening work. Two things in the method need attention: the chocolate goes in last, dissolved with the soda in hot water, and the sugar is low by modern expectations.
- The hinge: the hot-water chocolate slurryGrated chocolate stirred into the hot soda water softens into a paste that disperses through the batter. Add it while it is still warm and beat only until the colour is uniform; a cold, grainy slurry is likelier to streak and to leave the soda unevenly distributed.
- Sour milkThis means milk that had turned or clabbered of its own accord, which is not what modern refrigerated milk does. Use buttermilk, or stir 1½ teaspoons of lemon juice or white vinegar into ½ cup of whole milk and let it stand ten minutes. The acid is not optional — it is what the ½ teaspoon of soda reacts with.
- One square of chocolateA baking square of the period was one ounce of unsweetened chocolate, and that is what a modern 1 oz square of unsweetened baking chocolate gives you. Chop rather than grate if that is easier; it will melt in the hot water either way.
- SugarOne cup of sugar against an ounce of unsweetened chocolate makes a distinctly restrained, almost bittersweet cake by current standards. That is the period taste, and such cakes were often finished with an icing rather than sweetened further in the crumb.
- Oven temperatureThe recipe unusually gives its own number, 380°F, which sits at the upper end of what these books call a moderate oven. 375°F on a modern thermostat is close enough.
- Pan and timingA well-greased 9x5-inch loaf pan suits this quantity. Forty-five minutes is right for that shape, but start testing at forty — a skewer should come out with a few moist crumbs, not wet batter.
- Mixing orderFlour goes in undivided after the milk, then the chocolate mixture. Beat only until smooth once the flour is in; extended beating after the soda has met the acid wastes the lift.
- YieldOne loaf, about ten to twelve slices. It keeps two or three days wrapped, and is better on the second day.
Sour-milk cakes belong to the household economy of the dairy age: milk that had turned was not thrown out but put to work, its lactic acid providing the acid half of a chemical leavening pair with soda before baking powder was universal. By the time the Butterick book appeared, bottled milk and refrigeration were making genuinely soured milk scarcer in cities, and cookbooks of this period increasingly print substitutions using vinegar or lemon juice — the recipe here still assumes the reader has the real thing. Unsweetened baking chocolate was sold in one-ounce squares, and "one square" appears as a unit of measure in American recipes for decades. Butterick, a pattern company, published this alongside sewing and household guidance for the same audience of home managers, which may explain the book's brevity: the reader was assumed to know what creaming and a moderate oven meant, though the printed 380°F implies access to an oven thermometer.