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Delicious Chocolate Cake
The whites of eight eggs, two cups sugar, one of butter, three full cups flour, one of sweet milk, three tea-spoons baking-powder; beat the butter to a cream, stir in the sugar, and beat until light; "add the milk, then the flour. and beaten whites. When well beaten, divide into equal parts, and into half grate a cake of sweet chocolate. Bake in layers, spread with custard, and alternate the white and dark cakes. For custard for the cake, add a table-spoon of butter to one pint of milk, and let it come to a boil; stir in two eggs beaten with one cup of sugar, add two teaspoons of corn starch dissolved in a little milk. -Mrs. J. M. Riddle, Bellefontaine.
A four-layer marble-effect cake: one batter divided, half darkened with grated sweet chocolate, the layers stacked alternately with a stirred custard between. Most of the work is in the mixing and in getting the custard thick enough to hold.
- A cake of sweet chocolateThis means a bar of sweetened eating chocolate, sold in pressed cakes and often used by the half. Two to four ounces, finely grated, is the sensible range; grate it cold so it stays powdery and folds in without streaking.
- Sweet milkSimply fresh whole milk, named to distinguish it from the soured or buttermilk that older recipes call for. Use whole milk in both the cake and the custard.
- Cup and spoon sizesOne cup of butter is 8 oz, two sticks. Eight egg whites come to roughly one cup, or 240 ml, which is a useful check if your eggs are larger than the small nineteenth-century ones.
- FlourThe flour behind a recipe like this was likely soft winter wheat, closer to modern cake flour than to all-purpose. All-purpose will work but gives a tighter crumb; if you use it, spoon it into the cup rather than scooping.
- OvenThe recipe gives none. Bake the layers at 350F, 20 to 25 minutes for 8- or 9-inch pans, until the centres spring back. Thin layers overbake fast, so start checking at eighteen minutes.
- The whites go in last, and gentlyThe instruction to add milk, then flour, then beaten whites, then beat well is the one place the original misleads. Fold the whites in rather than beating them; the baking powder alone will not rescue a batter whose meringue has been knocked flat.
- The custard is the hingeBring the milk and butter to a boil, then temper the sugar-egg mixture into it off the heat and return it to a low flame with the cornstarch slurry. Cook, stirring, until it coats a spoon thickly, then cool it completely. Warm custard will slide out from between the layers.
- Yield and assemblyThe recipe does not say how many layers to bake. Alternate the dark and light layers, spreading custard between them.
Sweet chocolate came into American home baking as a grated solid rather than a powder: cooks bought pressed cakes of sweetened chocolate and shaved them into batters and custards. This recipe darkens only half the mixture, giving alternating dark and light layers, and the effect is a mild mocha-brown rather than the near-black of a modern devil's food. The Dixie Cook Book, like its sister compilations of the 1880s, was assembled from contributions signed with the maker's name and town, and Mrs. J. M. Riddle's Bellefontaine, Ohio, is a reminder that these "Southern" collections drew freely on a national network of church-supper and ladies'-aid recipes. Layer cakes themselves depended on two recent conveniences: chemical baking powder, commercially available from the 1850s onward, and cheap pressed tin pans of uniform size.