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Devils Food Cake
2 teaspoonfuls vanilla extract 2 eggs 2 cupfuls flour ½ cupful Crisco 1 teaspoonful baking soda 3 tablespoonfuls boiling water Boiled frosting 1/2 teaspoonful salt Put 1/2 cupful of sugar into small saucepan, add chocolate and 1 cupful milk. Put on stove and stir till it boils five minutes, stirring now and then. Remove from fire, add vanilla and set aside to cool. Beat Crisco and remainder of sugar to light cream, then add eggs well beaten and beat two minutes. Now add remainder of milk, soda dissolved in boiling water, flour, salt, and chocolate mixture. Mix carefully and divide into two large greased and floured layer tins and bake in moderate oven twentyfive minutes. Turn to cool and put together with boiled frosting. Sufficient for two large layers. 2 cupfuls sugar 1 cupful milk 5 eggs 3 cupfuls flour
The ingredient list on this page has been scrambled in setting — quantities appear twice and in conflict, and the chocolate has no amount at all. Read the method first, then reconcile it against the list.
- The list contradicts itselfFlour appears as both 2 cupfuls and 3 cupfuls, eggs as both 2 and 5. The method calls for 1 cupful of milk in the chocolate mixture plus "remainder of milk," which means the total must exceed 1 cupful, though only 1 cupful is listed. Treat the printed quantities as unreliable and work from a tested layer-cake formula of similar type.
- Chocolate quantity is missing entirelyThe method says "add chocolate" but no amount is given anywhere. Comparable layer cakes of the period generally call for somewhere in the region of two to four ounces of unsweetened baking chocolate; err toward the higher end against 2 cupfuls of sugar.
- Crisco in place of butterThis is a promotional book, so the shortening is doing the work butter would. Half a cupful of any solid vegetable shortening substitutes directly, though you lose the browning and flavour butter contributes. The cake will be softer and paler in crumb.
- Moderate ovenThe book gives no temperatures; a moderate oven is conventionally read as around 350F. Twenty-five minutes suits two layer tins of ordinary size; start checking at twenty.
- The cooked chocolate baseBoiling sugar, chocolate and milk together for five minutes gives a thicker, darker base than simply melting the chocolate in. Stir often — milk and sugar scorch fast on a thin pan bottom.
- Soda dissolved in boiling waterThree tablespoonfuls of boiling water is a carrier, not a liquid ingredient. The soda is the only leavening here; it reacts with the acidity of natural-process chocolate solids, which is what gives the crumb its reddish cast. Dutch-process chocolate will not react the same way.
- Boiled frostingThe classic pairing: a sugar syrup cooked to soft-ball stage, roughly 238F, beaten into stiff egg whites. The book assumes you know it and gives no separate recipe on this page.
- YieldTwo large layers, as the recipe states.
The Story of Crisco was published by Procter & Gamble in the 1910s to teach American cooks what to do with hydrogenated cottonseed oil, a product that had no place in any existing kitchen tradition. Every recipe in it is an argument, and the cake section is the most pointed part of the case: baking was the last redoubt of butter and lard, so the book proves over and over that a shortening cake rises, keeps and slices. Devil's food itself is an American invention, appearing in print from around the turn of the twentieth century, the dark counterpart to the pale angel food cake that preceded it, and the name is generally traced to that contrast rather than to any particular baker. The reddish cast of the crumb comes from baking soda meeting acidic natural cocoa.