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Chocolate Cake (One cup butter two of sugar)
One cup butter, two of sugar, one of milk, five eggs, leaving out the whites of three, four cups sifted flour, two tea-spoons bakingpowder, or one small tea-spoon soda and two of cream tartar in the flour; bake in three layers in deep jelly-tins. For icing, take whites of three eggs, beaten stiff, one and a half cups powdered sugar, six table-spoons grated chocolate, two tea-spoons vanilla. -Mrs. J. H. Shearer.
The cake layers are straightforward creamed-butter work, but the icing is uncooked egg white and cannot be recommended as written. Notes on the batter follow for reading and for anyone pairing the layers with a current frosting recipe.
- The icing is raw egg whiteThree whites are beaten stiff with powdered sugar, grated chocolate and vanilla and spread without cooking, so nothing in the frosting ever reaches a temperature that would kill Salmonella. Shell eggs of the period were treated with less concern; today a raw-white icing on a cake that will stand at room temperature is an avoidable risk. Use a current cooked or pasteurized-white icing instead.
- Eggs in the batter"Five eggs, leaving out the whites of three" means two whole eggs plus three additional yolks. The three spare whites are what the icing was built from, which is why the recipe is written this way.
- Cup measuresOne cup butter is 8 oz or 225 g, two cups sugar about 400 g. Flour was sifted before measuring, not after, so four sifted cups is roughly 16 oz or 450 g.
- LeaveningThe alternative given is the older one: one small teaspoon soda with two of cream of tartar is a homemade single-acting baking powder, mixed dry into the flour. Two teaspoons of modern double-acting baking powder does the same job with less urgency about getting the pans into the oven.
- Grated chocolateThis is unsweetened baking chocolate grated on a fine grater, not cocoa powder and not chips. Six tablespoons of gratings is a loose measure, somewhere near 1.5 oz.
- Pans and ovenPans -- Deep jelly-tins are round layer tins; three modern 8- or 9-inch cake pans stand in. The recipe gives no oven temperature and no baking time.
- YieldThe recipe gives no yield; a three-layer cake from this quantity of batter would serve roughly 12 to 16.
The Dixie Cook-Book belongs to the family of American community cookbooks compiled in the 1880s from material circulated among housekeepers, and the signed contribution — "Mrs. J. H. Shearer" — is the form those books took: a named neighbor vouching for a formula that worked in her own kitchen. The recipe also catches chocolate at a transitional moment. Through much of the nineteenth century chocolate in American baking is generally thought to have appeared chiefly as a flavoring for icings, fillings and beverages rather than in the crumb itself, and that is exactly what happens here: the cake is a plain rich butter cake, and all the chocolate lives in the frosting. The neat economy of the thing is period thinking too — two whole eggs and three yolks go into the batter, the three reserved whites into the icing, and no egg is wasted.