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Chocolate Cake (III)
Mrs. W. A. Carson.
One cup of butter, two cups of sugar, five eggs, leaving out two of the whites; one scant cup of milk, two full teaspoons of Cook's Friend baking powder; mix well in three cups of sifted flour ; bake in two long tins.
FOR FROSTING.-Beat whites of two eggs to a stiff froth, add a scant cup and a-half of sugar; flavour with vanilla, six tablespoons grated chocolate; the cake must be cold.
A plain butter cake from a Toronto community book, given in the shorthand of a cook who assumed you knew the method. The cake itself is straightforward; the frosting is the problem.
- The frosting is uncooked egg whiteTwo raw whites beaten with sugar and chocolate are never heated at any stage, and the recipe explicitly says the cake must be cold, so no residual heat reaches them. Raw shell eggs carry a Salmonella risk that 1877 cookery did not account for; use a current frosting recipe instead.
- Cook's Friend baking powderA Canadian brand widely advertised in the period. Like other baking powders of the day it was almost certainly single-acting, and it need not behave like modern double-acting powder, so two full teaspoons should not be assumed to translate directly to two teaspoons of today's.
- A cup of butterHalf a pound, about 225 g. It is measured solid and softened, and the method the book leaves unsaid is the usual one: cream butter and sugar, beat in eggs, then alternate flour and milk.
- The eggsFive eggs less two whites means three whole eggs plus two yolks. The two reserved whites are what the frosting is built from, which is why the quantities line up.
- Two long tinsLong loaf or bar tins. No dimensions are given and none are recorded, so a pair of modern loaf pans is an approximation rather than an equivalent; the batter, with three cups of flour, is enough for two.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given, as was normal in a book of this date. The recipe itself specifies nothing; a moderate oven of around 350F for roughly 40 to 50 minutes in loaf tins is a modern suggestion, not the book's instruction.
- Grated chocolateBlock chocolate of the period was generally unsweetened and had to be grated for use. Six tablespoons is a substantial quantity, and the frosting carries a correspondingly large amount of sugar.
The Home Cook Book was compiled in Toronto in 1877 by "ladies of Toronto and chief cities and towns in Canada" and sold to benefit the Hospital for Sick Children, which makes it one of the earliest Canadian charity cookbooks and the reason nearly every receipt carries a contributor's name. Chocolate cake appears three times over in the book, a sign of how quickly chocolate had moved from a drink to a baking ingredient once cheap block chocolate and chemical leavening were both available to the home baker. The named brand, Cook's Friend baking powder, was a commercial product of the day.