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Marbled Chocolate Cake
Make a batter as for white cake, take out one tea-cup, add to it five table-spoons of grated chocolate, moisten with milk, and flavor with vanilla; pour a layer of the white batter into the baking-pan, then drop the chocolate batter with a spoon in spots, and spread the remainder of the white batter over it. -Mrs. Sarah Phelps, Springfield, Ohio.
This is a variation instruction rather than a standalone recipe: it assumes you already have a white cake batter in the bowl and only tells you what to do with a cupful of it.
- You need a base recipe first"A batter as for white cake" means the standard egg-white butter cake of the period, roughly 1/2 cup butter, 1 1/2 cups sugar, 2 1/2 cups flour, 1 cup milk, 3 tsp baking powder and the whites of 4-6 eggs. Any modern white or vanilla layer-cake batter of about 5-6 cups volume works.
- Grated chocolate is not cocoa powderChocolate sold in cakes or blocks in this period was generally unsweetened baking chocolate, grated on a nutmeg grater or similar. Five tablespoons grated is roughly 1 to 1 1/2 oz; use finely chopped or grated unsweetened bar chocolate, or an equivalent of cocoa powder with about a tablespoon of butter for every three tablespoons of cocoa, and add a tablespoon of sugar since the base batter is not sweetened for it.
- Moisten with milk, sparinglyThe chocolate and its sugar absorb liquid and will stiffen that cupful. Add milk a teaspoon at a time until the dark batter drops from the spoon at the same consistency as the white, or it will sit in dense clots instead of marbling.
- Marbling techniqueDropping in spots and covering, as written, gives a deliberate layered pattern. For veining, draw a knife or skewer once through the pan in a figure-eight; more than that muddies both batters to a uniform tan.
- Pan and ovenThe recipe gives no pan, temperature or timing. Bake in a greased 9x5 loaf pan or an 8-inch tube pan at 350F, 45-55 minutes, until a skewer comes out clean; the chocolate portion darkens deceptively at the edges, so test the center rather than judging by color.
- YieldA full white-cake batter of this size gives one loaf or two 8-inch layers, 10 to 12 servings.
Marbled cakes appear in American cookbooks from the middle of the nineteenth century, at first made with molasses and spice for the dark batter; chocolate versions like this one appear to have become common only as grated eating and baking chocolate became cheaper and more widely stocked in the 1870s and 1880s. The Dixie Cook Book belongs to the family of community compilations in which recipes are credited to contributing housewives by name and town, and Mrs. Phelps of Springfield, Ohio, is typical of that practice: she assumes her reader already owns a white cake recipe and needs only the trick.