Food52
Adapted from The Ladies Receipt Book by Eliza Leslie. This, friends, is the earliest-yet-found printed recipe for Chocolate Cake. “Wait, really?” you may be thinking… but it’s true! Older recipes that mention Chocolate and Cake were actually referring to cakes meant for serving with chocolate, usually of the hot and drinkable variety. Though cakes containing chocolate as an ingredient date back further—the Marquis de Sade mentions one in a 1779 letter sent to his wife from prison—we have found no written recipe until Eliza Leslies’ 1847 book, The Ladies Reciept Book. Eliza’s recipe calls for using grated chocolate or “prepared cocoa.” I love that both the Chocolate Cake and the Chocolate Chip Cookie evolved containing bits of the heavenly stuff, so grated chocolate it is. As with the Indian Meal Cake, Eliza used an entire nutmeg. In fact, you rarely see an early 19th-century recipe that does not call for nutmeg. They were crazy for the stuff. The highlight of this cake, for me at least, is the icing. The word icing evolved from this thick mixture of egg whites and sugar; for ages, bakers would pour it over a hot cake, then return it to the oven until it was dry and, well, ice-like in its smoothness. Eventually bakers stopped icing the hot cake, and, like in the recipe below, poured the mixture over the a cooled cake, then set it aside to dry for a few hours (hello Royal Icing). As an aside, Eliza calls for lemon oil, rose extract, or vanilla extract to flavor the icing. Until the early 19th century, vanilla was used as a perfume by those well-off rather than for cooking or baking purposes due to the high cost of production (second only to Saffron).