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Devil's Food Cake
Let come to a boil one cupful of grated chocolate, one cupful of dark brown sugar, yolk of one egg, one-half of a cupful of sweet cream.
Cake Part-One-half cupful of butter, two eggs, one cupful dark brown sugar, one-half cup of sweet milk one teaspoonful soda, two cupfuls of flour. Flavor with vanilla. Add to this mixture, the boiled part, after it is cool. Bake in a loaf and frost with boiled icing.
A turn-of-the-century devil's food built on a cooked chocolate base folded into a plain butter cake. The original assumes you know how a loaf cake goes together, so the gaps are worth filling.
- Cool the chocolate mixture completelyThis is the hinge. The boiled part is thick, hot and full of egg yolk; stirred into the creamed butter while warm it will loosen the batter to soup and curdle. Cook it, then let it come down to room temperature before it goes anywhere near the cake mixture.
- "Grated chocolate"Unsweetened block baking chocolate, grated on a box grater. A cupful grated runs to roughly 4 oz / 115 g, though the weight varies a good deal with how fine the grate is. Chocolate chips are sweetened and stabilised and are not a substitute here; the sugar balance depends on the chocolate being bitter.
- Sweet cream and sweet milkBoth simply mean unsoured — heavy or whipping cream, and ordinary whole milk. In older books these are specified to distinguish them from the soured cream and buttermilk that many recipes call for.
- Boiling the chocolate partBring it up slowly over low heat, stirring constantly, and let it barely bubble for a minute or two until it thickens to a heavy sauce. Chocolate and brown sugar scorch readily; a heavy pan or a double boiler is the safe route.
- The sodaOne teaspoon is on the generous side for two cups of flour. It works because there is acid for it to meet: the molasses in dark brown sugar, the cream, and unalkalised chocolate. Use dark brown sugar and unalkalised (non-Dutched) block chocolate, and dissolve or sift the soda thoroughly — undispersed soda leaves soapy pockets.
- Pan and ovenThe recipe says only "bake in a loaf" and gives no oven heat. For a modern kitchen, a single deep tin of roughly 9x5 inches, or an 8-inch square, at about 350F for 45 to 55 minutes in the loaf and less in the square, until a skewer comes out clean.
- Boiled icingA sugar syrup cooked to the soft-ball stage, 238-240F, beaten into stiff egg whites. Add the syrup in a thin steady stream and keep beating until the bowl is only just warm, or it will set grainy.
- YieldOne loaf, about ten to twelve slices. Keep it under a dome; the boiled icing goes crisp on the surface.
Devil's food appears in American cookbooks around the turn of the twentieth century, and the name is usually read as a dark counterpart to angel food cake — the pale, fatless white-of-egg sponge that had become fashionable a decade or two earlier. The reddish-brown crumb often associated with the cake is generally explained as a pH effect: baking soda in excess of the acid present shifts the colour of the pigments in natural, unalkalised cocoa toward red. What marks this version as early is the cooked chocolate base, a separate mixture of chocolate, sugar, yolk and cream boiled down and folded in cold — a step suited to chocolate sold as a hard bitter block, which had to be melted and cooked before it could be worked into a batter.