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Chocolate Cake (One cup butter three of brown)
One cup butter, three of brown sugar, one of sweet milk, four of flour, yolks of seven eggs, nine table-spoons grated Baker's chocolate, three tea-spoons baking powder. This may be baked as a layer cake, making a white cake of the whites of the eggs, baking in layers, and putting them together with frosting, alternating the layers. Mrs. Frank Woods Robinson, Kenton.
A yolks-only chocolate cake from the era when a recipe was a list of proportions and the cook was assumed to know the rest. The quantities are large by modern standards and no oven temperature or mixing method is given.
- Scale firstOne cup butter, three cups brown sugar, one cup milk and four cups flour is a very large batter — enough for three or four 9-inch layers, or two loaf pans. Halving it is reasonable for a household cake.
- Sweet milk"Sweet" means fresh, unsoured whole milk, distinguished from the buttermilk or clabbered milk that was equally common in a nineteenth-century kitchen. Use whole milk; the baking powder here does not need acid.
- Baker's chocolateIn this period Baker's meant unsweetened cake chocolate in a hard block, which the recipe has the cook grate rather than melt. Nine tablespoons of gratings is roughly 2 ounces by weight; unsweetened baking chocolate or the same weight of chocolate chopped fine is the direct substitute. Do not use modern sweetened chocolate or the cake will be cloying against three cups of sugar.
- Method the recipe omitsCream the butter with the brown sugar, beat in the yolks, then add the flour sifted with the baking powder alternately with the milk. The grated chocolate can be stirred into the milk and warmed slightly to dissolve, which gives a smoother crumb than folding dry gratings into the batter.
- OvenNo temperature is stated because the cook judged her own range. Bake at 350F: 20 to 25 minutes for thin layers, 45 to 60 minutes for a loaf, testing with a skewer.
- The seven whitesThe alternating layer cake assumes you have a white cake recipe on hand, and the recipe plainly intends the whites to be used rather than discarded. If you are not making a companion white cake, the whites keep several days refrigerated or freeze well.
- FrostingNone is specified. A plain boiled white icing or a confectioners' sugar and cream frosting is period-appropriate and stands up to the dark, molasses-heavy layers better than a chocolate one.
Yolk-only cakes were a practical response to a kitchen economy in which whites and yolks were rarely wanted at the same moment: angel food, silver cake and white mountain cake all consumed whites, and gold cake, sponge and rich chocolate cakes such as this one absorbed the yolks left behind. The instruction to bake a white cake alongside and alternate the layers is that logic made explicit. Chocolate as a cake ingredient became widespread in American home baking only in the second half of the nineteenth century, once Baker's and similar firms sold reliable pressed cakes of unsweetened chocolate that a cook could grate at home; before that chocolate was chiefly a drink. The Dixie Cook Book, like other subscription cookbooks of the 1880s, gathered its contents by soliciting recipes from named contributors in named towns — Mrs. Frank Woods Robinson of Kenton is one of hundreds.