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Chocolate Cake
Mrs. J. D. Odell.
One and-half cups of sugar, one cup of milk, two cups of flour, piece of butter the size of a small egg, one egg, two teaspoonsful Cook's Friend baking powder. Icing. Whites of two eggs, one cup of sugar, one-half cup chocolate; beat all together and cook in a dish set in boiling water until smooth like iceing; spread between the cakes.
A plain one-egg butter cake baked in layers, with a cooked chocolate meringue between them. Note that no chocolate goes into the batter at all — the name comes entirely from the filling.
- The cake is a layer cakeNothing in the text says so, but "spread between the cakes" implies the batter is divided between shallow tins. The quantity would suit roughly two 8-inch round pans, though no pan size is given.
- No oven temperature givenBake at 350F. Thin layers of this sort need 20 to 25 minutes; test with a skewer rather than by time.
- Butter the size of a small eggRoughly 1½ to 2 oz, or 3 to 4 tablespoons. The recipe gives no method; creaming the butter with the sugar before adding the egg and milk is the usual approach for a cake of this type.
- Cook's Friend baking powderA Canadian brand (McLaren's Cook's Friend), still sold; any modern double-acting baking powder can be used in the same amount. Two level teaspoons to two cups of flour is in line with normal modern practice, so measure level rather than heaped.
- FlourUse all-purpose. If the crumb comes out tough, replacing 2 tablespoons per cup with cornstarch approximates a softer cake flour.
- "One-half cup chocolate"Genuinely ambiguous. It most likely means grated unsweetened block chocolate, which is what a Toronto kitchen of the 1870s kept; a half cup of that with a cup of sugar gives a sweet, dark filling. It could also mean cocoa, which would be much drier and stronger. Start with 2 oz grated unsweetened chocolate, melted, and taste.
- The icing is the hingeWhites, sugar and chocolate beaten together in a bowl over boiling water is a Swiss meringue in all but name. Whisk constantly. If you want the whites pasteurised, verify 160F on a thermometer rather than judging by look — thickening and gloss can occur below that. Overheat it and the whites scramble into threads.
- ServingTwo layers, eight to ten slices. The filling sets soft and does not keep well; assemble the day it is eaten.
The Home Cook Book (Toronto, 1877) presents its recipes as contributed by named local women — Mrs. J. D. Odell here being one of hundreds — and was sold in aid of the Hospital for Sick Children, making it one of the earliest and most successful Canadian charity cookbooks. Its chocolate cake is characteristic of the period in that the chocolate lives in the filling rather than the batter: chocolate was expensive, sold in hard unsweetened blocks that had to be grated, and a little of it stretched further as an icing than stirred through two cups of flour. Cakes described as "chocolate" in North American books before about 1890 are frequently this arrangement — a plain butter or white cake married to a chocolate filling — and the fully chocolate crumb we now expect arrived with cheaper cocoa powder and the spread of commercial baking chocolate. The reference to Cook's Friend baking powder places the recipe in a period when chemical leavening was gradually, and only partly, taking over from the beaten-egg and yeast-raised cakes of earlier household manuals.