I had one criteria for this month’s episode–it can’t use eggs. Yup, eggs have officially become too expensive for me. And this recipe was unique enough to be intriguing. Because for chocolate cake…there isn’t actually any chocolate in it! Don’t forget to check out the one minute Instagram version.
Chocolate Cakes
The Virginia Housewife
Published in 1824
Step One: Sift together “nice brown sugar” with flour. Simple enough. Or it would be if my brown sugar wasn’t hard…I kept telling myself that in the 19th century, sugar would have been sold in the shape of a hard cone anyway…but I didn’t have the special tool they did for breaking off pieces of hard sugar. Let’s just say I now have much more respect for them figuring out how to sift that brown sugar in with flour. (Modern tip: if your brown sugar is hard, throw a piece of bread in with it…but the day BEFORE you need to use it!!)
Step Two: Put in melted butter and make it into a paste. For once they actually had measurements up to this point, but I can’t say it called for enough butter to make an actual paste…unless 2 ounces meant something other than it does now. But I did my best!
Step Three: Add “as much milk as will wet it.” Aaand…there go the measurements I was bragging about. But I was actually pretty impressed with my result. Of course, it helped that I knew it needed to be rolled out, not poured out. “But it’s a cake!” you say. Yeah, about that….
Step Four: And here is where the recipe tells us to “knead until light” and then roll out “tolerably thin.” Not only are we wondering at this point what kind of “cake” this is – but what happened to the chocolate???
Step Five: Cut it in strips and bake them on a griddle. Well, that explains the whole kneading and rolling thing. But this did give me some heartburn. What did it mean when it said to “bake” on a griddle? Was I supposed to cover it up somehow? Put it on a griddle and stick it in the oven? Finally, I decided to treat it like a griddle cake…which made sense once I thought of it that way, and I went ahead and just used a regular griddle, flipping it the way you do pancakes! I can’t promise this was the most genuine way to do it, since if one were to put it on a griddle in a fireplace, there is bound to be some heat over the top as well, but it’s as close we are getting until I get my own 19th century kitchen.
Step Six: And finally, I was instructed to put the cakes in rows like a checker pattern and serve them to eat with chocolate. With chocolate? At first I thought perhaps this meant actual pieces of chocolate. Then I thought maybe I was supposed to make a chocolate sauce to drizzle over the top. But finally, I settled on hot chocolate. Because it specifically said to “serve them to eat with chocolate”. And, thinking back to 19th century references to drinking chocolate, I remembered most of the time, they simply refer to it as chocolate. So it seemed the most likely interpretation, though I’d be interested in knowing if any of you think otherwise!.
Spoiler alert: This was one recipe my husband really liked. And, when I asked him to guess what it was called, his first guess was Chocolate Bread!! Apparently it’s just me who thinks it is weird to call something chocolate without any chocolate in it considering how much faster Daniel figured out that it was named based on what it was served with rather than it’s ingredients. Fascinating. Though…I guess we do the same thing with Tea Cakes and Coffee Cake, now that I think about it.
What about you? Have you run across that in any modern or historical recipes before?
Forest Idylls 