Chocolate Cake
Take one-half cup of butter; two cups of sugar; two cups of flour; one-half cup of coffee (hot); one-half cup of milk; two teaspoons of baking powder; two teaspoons of vanilla; two eggs; one square of chocolate. Rub the butter and sugar to a cream, and add the beaten eggs and then the milk. Grate the chocolate fine, and add it to the coffee, which should be very hot; stir well and gradually add this mixture to the butter, sugar and eggs. Sift the powder and flour together; add, beating well, and then put in the vanilla. Bake in one loaf for forty minutes in a moderate oven.
A straightforward creamed-butter cake whose only real trick is that the chocolate is melted in hot coffee before it goes into the batter. A few of the measures need translating.
- One square of chocolateA square here is one ounce of unsweetened baking chocolate, the standard scored block of the period. Check the scoring on a modern bar, as squares are not always an ounce; weigh out one ounce, or chop an ounce of 100% cacao fine.
- Moderate ovenConventionally taken as somewhere around 325-375F; 350F is a reasonable working figure. The original assumes a range whose heat you judged by hand, so treat the forty minutes as a starting point rather than a rule.
- The hot coffee is the hingeGrating the chocolate fine and stirring it into very hot coffee melts it completely, so it disperses evenly through the batter rather than staying in specks. Make sure the coffee really is very hot, as the recipe insists.
- Add the hot mixture graduallyIt is hot enough to loosen the creamed butter if dumped in at once. Pour it in a thin stream while beating so the batter stays emulsified rather than breaking into a greasy curd.
- Pan and batter"One loaf" most likely means baked as a single cake rather than in layers; a loaf tin, a round tin or a square pan would all suit. Grease and flour whatever you use. The batter is fairly fluid for a butter cake because of the coffee and milk.
- Timing and donenessForty minutes may be short if you bake it deep in a loaf tin; a deeper cake can want considerably longer. Test with a skewer in the center and pull it when the crumbs are moist but not wet.
- Baking powderTwo teaspoons for two cups of flour is in line with modern practice. Sift it with the flour as directed.
- Yield and servingAbout twelve slices. Iced with a plain chocolate or boiled white frosting in the manner of the period, though it holds up unfrosted as a keeping cake.
The Butterick Publishing Company sold dress patterns and magazines, and its cook book belongs to a wave of turn-of-the-century household volumes aimed at the middle-class woman keeping house with little or no help. Chocolate cake of this kind became easier and more common once cheap chemical leavening and reliably ground eating chocolate were both on the grocer's shelf; before that, chocolate in American cookery was chiefly a drink. The half cup of hot coffee is the recipe's period signature. Coffee deepens chocolate flavor without reading as coffee. Whether cooks understood the chemistry or simply had a pot of coffee already hot on the stove is not recorded, but the technique outlasted the book.