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Chocolate Cake
One and one-half cupfuls of sugar, one-half cup butter, three eggs well beaten, one cupful of sweet milk, three cupfuls sifted flour, three teaspoonfuls baking powder.
This is a formula rather than a method: the book assumes a cook who already knows how to cream butter and sugar and judge a cake by the look of the batter. Two things are missing outright — the chocolate and the baking instructions.
- The chocolate is not in the listAs printed there is no chocolate at all, which is either a typesetting loss or an assumption that the reader would add it as a matter of course. For a cake of this size, 2 to 3 oz of unsweetened chocolate, melted and cooled, or about 1/2 cup of cocoa sifted in with the flour, gives the expected result; cocoa will need a little extra milk.
- CupfulsBy the late nineteenth century the cupful was generally taken as the 8 fl oz measure, though usage was not wholly uniform. The book specifies sifted flour, so three cupfuls is roughly 12 to 13 oz — noticeably less than three cups dipped straight from a modern bag.
- Sweet milkSimply fresh whole milk, specified to distinguish it from sour milk or buttermilk, which would have called for soda instead of baking powder. Do not substitute buttermilk here without adjusting the leavening.
- Baking powderThree teaspoonfuls to three cupfuls of flour is about one teaspoon per cup, in line with usual modern practice; powders of the period were single-acting rather than double-acting, so they would have done their work earlier in the mixing.
- Method the book leaves outCream the butter with the sugar until pale, beat in the eggs, then add the flour and baking powder alternately with the milk in two or three additions. Overworking the batter once the flour is in toughens the crumb, which is the one thing likely to spoil this cake.
- OvenBake at 350F. This quantity fills two 9-inch round layers (25 to 30 minutes) or one 9x13 pan (35 to 40 minutes); a tester should come out clean and the centre spring back.
- Yield and finishingAbout 12 servings. The recipe gives no frosting; a plain boiled or confectioners' sugar icing is period-appropriate.
At some point chocolate shifted from a drink to a baking ingredient in American households, largely because the Dutch cocoa press had made defatted, alkalised cocoa powder cheap and shelf-stable, and firms such as Baker's were selling unsweetened cake chocolate in wrapped cakes to home cooks. Recipes of this vintage are typically written as bare proportions, sometimes in the pattern known as the "cup cake" formula — a memorised ratio of sugar, butter, eggs, milk and flour, with flavourings varied at will — because the audience was expected to supply the technique. That is why so many nineteenth-century chocolate cakes read as a plain butter cake with chocolate appended.