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Chocolate Cake Made with Sour Milk
One cup of sugar, creamed with one-half cup of butter; three eggs well beaten; one-half cup of sour milk; one-third teaspoon of soda dissolved in one-third cup of hot water; one square of chocolate dissolved in this same water; and flour to thicken.
A terse recipe of the type written for cooks who already knew what cake batter should look like. The vague flour quantity is the only real obstacle.
- "Flour to thicken" is the sticking pointThe original assumes you know the consistency by sight: a batter that drops thickly from the spoon rather than pours. With this quantity of sugar, butter and eggs that works out to roughly 1 1/2 cups of flour, added a little at a time until the batter mounds slightly. Too much and the cake bakes dry and tight.
- Sour milkThis means naturally soured raw milk, thick and acidic, not spoiled pasteurised milk. Buttermilk is the direct modern stand-in; half a cup of whole milk with a teaspoon of lemon juice or vinegar stirred in and left ten minutes also works. The acid is what the soda reacts with, so it cannot be replaced with sweet milk.
- Soda quantityOne-third teaspoon is a small amount, in line with the usual period ratio of about half a teaspoon of soda to a cup of sour milk. If the batter tastes soapy or the crumb turns yellowish-brown, there was too much soda. No additional baking powder is called for and none is needed.
- One square of chocolateA square meant one ounce of unsweetened baking chocolate, which is still sold in one-ounce squares. Do not substitute semi-sweet or a chopped eating bar; the sugar balance and the near-total absence of added fat in unsweetened chocolate both matter here.
- Melting in the hot waterThe soda water and the chocolate go into the same third of a cup of hot water, so the chocolate arrives as a thin paste rather than a solid mass. Melt the chocolate in the water first, then stir in the soda, and add it to the creamed mixture before the flour.
- OvenThe recipe gives no oven or timing instruction. A moderate oven, about 350F, suits this batter: roughly 25 to 30 minutes for two 8-inch layers, 35 to 40 for a single loaf, until a straw comes out clean.
- YieldEnough for two thin 8-inch layers or one 8-inch square, serving eight. The recipe gives no frosting; a boiled white icing or a plain chocolate frosting would not be out of place.
Sour-milk cakes belong to the long stretch of American baking between the arrival of cheap saleratus in the 1840s and the general adoption of reliable baking powder and refrigerated milk in the twentieth century. In a household with a cow or a daily milk delivery and no ice box, milk soured as a matter of course, and thrifty cookbooks treated the result as an ingredient rather than a loss: its acid, met with a pinch of soda, gave lift and a notably tender crumb. Chocolate cake itself was still relatively new as a household staple when the Butterick book appeared in the early 1900s, since eating chocolate and baking chocolate only became cheap enough for everyday cakes in the later nineteenth century. The recipe is brief, and willing to say "flour to thicken" rather than name a figure.