Fudge Cake
½ cup butter or shortening
¼ teaspoon salt
1½ cups sugar
½ cup cocoa
3 eggs
1 cup milk
2/½ cups flour
17/½ cups chopped walnut-meats
2 teaspoons baking-powder
1½ teaspoons vanilla
Cream the butter or shortening and sugar; add the well-beaten egg-yolks. Mix and sift the dry ingredients and add alternately with the milk. Stir in the chopped nut-meats, well floured, and add the flavoring. Fold in the stiffly beaten egg-whites. Bake in layer-cake tins in a moderate oven (380° F.) for forty-five minutes. When cold, spread chocolate frosting between layers and on top.
A straightforward creamed butter cake with cocoa, split between layer tins. Two of the quantities have come through the printing garbled, and the baking time belongs to a deeper pan than most cooks will use.
- The garbled measurements"2/½ cups flour" is almost certainly 2½ cups, which balances the fat, sugar and liquid here. "17/½ cups chopped walnut-meats" is meaningless as printed; the likeliest reading is 1½ cups, though ½ to 1 cup would sit more comfortably in a batter this size.
- Baking timeForty-five minutes at 380°F suits a single deep pan, not layers. Two 9-inch layers of this batter are usually done in 25 to 30 minutes, when a skewer comes out with a few moist crumbs and the edges have pulled from the tin.
- 380°F is the book's "moderate"Older ranges ran hotter and less evenly than a modern thermostat. 350°F is the safer setting for a cocoa batter, which scorches at the edges before the center sets.
- Cocoa, not chocolateThe recipe means unsweetened cocoa powder; natural cocoa is what an American kitchen of the period would have had to hand. Sift it with the flour so it does not stay in lumps.
- Flouring the nutsTossing the chopped walnuts in a spoonful of the measured flour keeps them suspended rather than sinking. Take that flour from the 2½ cups rather than adding extra.
- Separated eggsYolks go in with the creamed butter, whites are folded in at the very end after the flour. Fold in two additions and stop while a few streaks remain; overworking here costs the lift the baking powder cannot replace.
- YieldEnough batter for two 9-inch layers, or three thinner 8-inch layers; the recipe specifies neither. Serves roughly 10 to 12 once frosted.
- The frostingNone is given. Any cooked or confectioners'-sugar chocolate frosting works.
"Fudge cake" is a name generally traced to the arrival of fudge itself, in the American home-cooking vocabulary of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when cheap cocoa powder made chocolate baking an everyday matter rather than a luxury. Cocoa presses are usually said to have made defatted powder widely available from the mid-1800s, and by the early years of the household-manual trade, a cocoa layer cake with walnuts and chocolate frosting was standard domestic repertoire rather than anything special. The recipe's structure - cream, add yolks, alternate dry with milk, fold in whites - is the era's default cake method, taught in cooking schools and repeated with small variations across hundreds of books; the specified oven temperature places it loosely, since printed degrees only became usual once ovens carried thermometers.