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Devil's Food Cake
½ cup butter 2 cups sugar 1 cup milk 4 eggs. 1 teaspoon vanilla 4 teaspoons baking 4 squares bitter chocolate powder 2 cups flour (pastry) teaspoon salt Cream the shortening, add the sugar gradually and the egg-yolks that have been beaten until thick and lemon-colored. Mix and sift the dry ingredients, flour, baking powder and salt; and add alternately with the milk. Lastly add the egg whites beaten until stiff, melted chocolate and vanilla. Bake from 45 minutes to an hour in a moderate oven 350°F. Bake in round pan with tube. 7 egg whites 1 cup fine granulated sugar
The method here is a standard creamed butter cake with melted chocolate folded in at the end, but the ingredient list has come through incomplete, so treat the quantities below with care and lean on the technique rather than the numbers.
- Missing quantitiesThe text as printed gives no amount for the shortening, the milk, or the egg yolks, and the salt quantity has lost its number. Two figures do appear on the page — "1 cup fine granulated sugar" and "7 egg whites" — though it is not certain they belong to this cake rather than a neighbouring recipe. Anything beyond that is inference, not what the page says.
- Bitter chocolateFour squares means four ounces of unsweetened baking chocolate, sold in 1 oz squares then and now. Melt it and let it cool to barely warm before folding in, or it will seize the batter and deflate the whites.
- Pastry flourPastry flour is softer and lower in protein than all-purpose. Cake flour is the closest current substitute; measure by weight if you can, since 2 cups of cake flour is roughly 8 oz.
- Baking powderFour teaspoons is a heavy hand by modern standards, and the powders of the period were single-acting and variable in strength. With a current baking powder, 2 to 2 1/2 teaspoons for 2 cups of flour is the usual proportion.
- OvenThe recipe already names 350°F, which is what a moderate oven meant. Forty-five minutes to an hour suits a deep tube pan; a tester in the thickest part should come out clean.
- Tube panA round pan with a tube is what would now be called an angel food or chiffon pan — the central column carries heat into the middle of a tall, dense batter. A 9 or 10 inch tube pan is the equivalent. This batter is not a true foam cake, so butter and flour the pan.
- Folding orderWhites, melted chocolate and vanilla all go in last. Fold the chocolate through a spoonful of batter first to loosen it, then fold that into the whole, so the whites are not knocked down by chasing streaks of stiff chocolate.
- YieldA tube cake of this size gives 12 to 16 slices, and it keeps well covered for two or three days.
"Devil's food" appears in American cookbooks around the turn of the twentieth century, the dark counterpart to the angel food cakes that were popular at the same moment — the pairing of names is part of the appeal, a heavy dark cake against a white weightless one. Early versions are often reddish-brown rather than black, which is usually attributed to unsweetened chocolate reacting with an alkaline leavener, and is frequently given as the origin of the later red velvet cake. What the recipe does show is how far baking chocolate and chemical leavening had become pantry staples by this point.