welcome friends welcome back to the
kitchen welcome back to sunday morning
and the old cookbook show today we're
not really working from an old cookbook
this is um
this is a supplement that used to be
very common in weekend newspapers and
this one is from the brooklyn daily
eagle
most of the front cover is misting
but it's uh it's a book of cookery and
household manual and this was published
in 1927 by the brooklyn daily eagle a
newspaper
and i find these very interesting
because
the recipes are driven by the
advertising that you find in the pages
in this book so you know in certain
sections you'll see cookware that is
used to cook the dishes that you're
cooking or
ingredients that are used to cook the
dishes that you're cooking we're going
to do something called a solid chocolate
cake
and the full page ad on the other side
is for the right cake company cakes so
if you didn't want to make your own cake
you could pop down to their store um and
buy one already made
so this is called a solid chocolate cake
and i don't know exactly what they mean
by solid is it going to be really dense
um i kind of think it might be based on
the ingredients but who knows
or
is it a solid cake like is this going to
be an amazing cake so we're going to
start off with
milk and dark chocolate
in a pot on the stove top
and it calls for a half a cup of dark
chocolate so i've got this really dark
chocolate that i've broken up i'm going
to put it in there and get it melting
and yes i hear you you live in a
european metric country
and you have no clue why canada and the
united states still use volume
measurements for a lot of what we cook
and bake
yes weights would be so much more
accurate but we get by we hit by and
even canada now is
a metric country but we still use volume
for everything we just use metric volume
instead of using grams we use
milliliters which is a volume
measurement
so a half a cup of chocolate
almost impossible to tell what they
meant by that
it could be
a half a cup of chopped chocolate
so he would actually be getting more
chocolate it could be a half a cup of
chocolate chunks like i just put in
i take that to mean that the amount of
chocolate isn't super important and that
if you like chocolate
use a little bit of extra so i've got
and i weighed it 150 grams of chocolate
in there and that's what we're going to
do
now next up it tells me to cream half a
cup of shortening
you're going to notice this is butter
and in this time period
pretty much any time pre-world war ii
when you see a recipe that calls for
shortening
shortening in that time period meant any
fat
any fat that was solid at room
temperature in fact shortening still
means any fat solid at room temperature
but
the way that the english language works
and the way that we shorten things in
the way that we try to you know save
time in printing
shortening has come to mean the
shorthand for
vegetable shortening
and so a lot of recipes that you see
today when they ask for shortening or in
the recipe they're actually asking for
vegetable shortening in this time period
it could have been anything it could
have been butter it could have been lard
it could have been beef fat
um to a smaller extent it could have
been chicken fat probably not so much
for chocolate cake
and
this um this book makes reference to
that in other recipes where it says to
use a really good shortening like butter
so it could be anything and when you see
these older recipes
if it calls for shortening it could be
lard or butter
and i know that a lot of
a lot of
celebrity chefs
um in the time period that we're in
today
whacks on and on and on about you know
the water content of shortening and that
if you're using butter you need to use
a little bit more a little bit less than
if you were using vegetable shortening
or if you were using lard
and yes that's true different solid fats
do have different moisture contents
there's different moisture content in
butter than there is in lard or beef fat
or vegetable shortening but the reality
is you're cooking at home and you just
mismeasured the milk that you put in
there you have mismeasured the flour at
least i know that i have so all of these
different mist measurements
are probably more important than the
liquid content of your fat liquid
content of your fat in a small recipe
like this really isn't going to make
that big of a difference
now to the butter we're going to add
some sugar
and we're going to cream that together
and don't forget about the chocolate
melting in the milk give it a bit of a
stir
you don't want this to come to a boil
you don't want to get it that hot you
just want to get it warm enough
that it melts the chocolate and we're
there so i'm going to turn that off and
i'm going to set it aside and let it
cool down a little bit
just like if we were making a brownie
this is very close to a brownie
now the recipe tells me to put in three
eggs sorta so i'm gonna put in one whole
egg
and then the next two eggs i'm going to
separate out the whites and keep them
for
the icing
and only put the yolk in the cake
now i've got flour here and this is
baking soda and we're just going to mix
that together i'll get a spoon and i
also need sour milk
so
in this time period sour milk meant
quite literally milk that's been sour
and in these recipes
you'll see them refer to sour milk
you'll see them refer to sweet milk and
you'll see them refer to buttermilk
and
depending on the time period they are
three different things
the sweet milk is just milk we would
just refer that today to as milk it has
nothing to do with sugar or added sugar
in it a lot of people get confused with
the idea that it is condensed sweetened
milk it's not it's just regular milk
i'm using buttermilk
because buttermilk today in the grocery
store at least here in canada and the
united states
is just soured milk it is exactly the
same thing
as the soured milk that they were asking
for in this recipe
and buttermilk depending on the time
period
can mean a whole bunch of different
things that is one of those um
word phrases that the more research i do
it becomes more confusing because
it's referred it refers to so many
different things it can refer to
sour milk
in the context of today but also in the
context of a hundred years ago it could
mean soured milk that they were then
going to turn into butter so
like a european cultured butter so the
butter is cultured or soured first and
then churned
and you take the butter and it's got a
really nice flavor
it could also mean the liquid that's
left over
from churning butter which is a very
clear liquid it doesn't have any milk
solids or fats left in it because
they've all come out in the butter
and that was used for baking as well so
it could mean a whole bunch of different
things depending on which recipe writer
was writing about it
but for the most part at this point if
you see buttermilk you're just getting
cultured butter it's a one percent milk
that has
some added bacterial culture and it's
left to ferment so i need to alternate
between the buttermilk
the flour and soda
and i'll turn that down just to stir
and the melted chocolate and milk
just a little bit at a time and let it
all
incorporate
a little bit of buttermilk
and a little bit of chocolate
now the recipe implies that you bake
this in multiple tins and create a layer
cake so i've got two eight inch cake
pans that i have greased
just as per instructions
i was thinking that a seven inch cake
pan would have been a better idea we'll
get them in the oven and we'll see what
happens
and so obviously i'm trying to split the
batter evenly between the two
cake tins
we'll see how that goes
now the recipe tells me to bake it in an
oven set to 375 degrees so in the go
so it gives me a baking temperature but
it doesn't give me a baking time so i'm
going to keep a really close eye on
those so that they don't over bake in
the meantime let's give this a go
oh
that's really chocolatey
there's gonna be a good cake
the cakes are out and cooling the recipe
tells me to put together with emergency
frosting and it told me to keep out two
egg whites to use in the emergency
frosting but you go down to the
emergency frosting recipe right below it
and it says to use only one egg white
is that a mistake in the recipes um
i don't know i'm going to use both
because it the one recipe told me to
keep both out so i'm going to go ahead
and use both
it says to put it into a double boiler
it says to use 7 8 of a cup of sugar so
i'm gonna put that in
and three tablespoons of water
now the recipe says i can flavor with
any desired flavoring but equal parts of
lemon vanilla and almond make an
excellent flavoring so i don't know how
much i'm going to put
probably a half a teaspoon of each
because that seems like an awful lot
and now i go to town with an egg beater
the only real instruction at this point
is to uh to beat it until it's the
consistency to spread
and we haven't reached that yet
so just keep beating it until it's there
okay let's see
that looks just about spreadable
now if you've watched this channel for
any amount of time you'll know that i um
ice cakes i do put icing on cakes but i
don't ice cakes so there's no artful
putting icing on a cake for me i don't
really spend a whole lot of time i just
kind of get the icing on
and i'm happy with it so
we're gonna put this together a little
bit worried about the emergency frosting
um i know that it's just a riff on
uh cooked
meringue icing but the flavors
the flavors seem a little weird to me to
be putting together and i know that they
probably don't go extremely well with a
chocolate cake i know that fully i was
just intrigued by an icing that would
have
those three flavorings in it
we'll see how it tastes when julie gets
here
hey glenn
hey friends hey nice cake
that's an odd textured frosting odd
texture frosting it is an emergency
frosting well then i'll take it
will we having a frosting emergency
apparently and this is the this i need
some frosting right now
this is the frosting that they say goes
with the solid chocolate cake
so i guess let's just cut into it and
see what happens the um
the frosting had a really weird texture
when i was making it it's kind of like a
boiled frosting but
it's not
because you don't boil the sugar syrup
you don't get the same reaction with the
eggs
as you would with a boiled and so it's
got this kind of weird
well you know no one says that it is
ah
is necessarily a bad thing so now that
we've cut it off i'm curious about the
texture i so need to just you know does
it
it's funny it's got a texture like
meringue it does have a texture like
meringue it's got like a lemony flavor
too it doesn't does
so it's going on a chocolate cake and it
says
that you know you should put um
any desired flavoring but equal parts
lemon vanilla and almond
taste really good
okay so i didn't catch the almond the
lemon dominated for my initial flavor
but let's stop so i thought okay i'll
put them all in and see if it works but
i don't know if it'll work with
chocolate cake
the chocolate is so dominant that you
don't really notice the
that's a pretty good chocolate cake
it's a solid chocolate cake
um
i was actually thinking because it was
called solid
it would be more dense like a cakey
brownie like a thick a little more dense
i also wonder if it's it's a solid
chocolate cake because you use
an actual
chocolate that you melt rather than
there other than cocoa so it's not it's
not flavored with cocoa i'm clearly not
bothered by the cake no no because i
keep wanting to have more so clearly
it's it's a
pretty decent cake
i don't know that i need emergency
frosting but i don't think i'd use that
frosting again
no
no i think i think a chocolate frosting
a butter based frosting
would would be
much more to my liking having a hard
time now but
overall as an experiment i think cake is
pretty good i would probably
i cooked it in an eight inch pan
i think it would probably be better in a
seven or a six inch pan a little thicker
a little give it a little more loft
that's my own personal bias i think it
would i think it would bake better i
think it would be nicer but
well that's the best part then you just
do version two
i think it works
thanks for stopping by see you again
soon
you