Rye and Ginger: 30 June-06 July 1916: An awful muddle

[james_davis_nicoll]

(After 1911) King Street, Waterloo, Ontario Postcard. C 5 20. Waterloo Public Library. Alexander house is the grey building on the right hand side

Dominion Day, 1916

Comments

[magedragonfire.livejournal.com]

Because I am the sort of person who goes straight for the delicious and only goes back to the meat when I've had dessert:

"Boil slowly until a little dropped into cold water will form a soft ball when rolled between the fingers." - That's probably where the 'caramel' part of the recipe title comes from, even though it's only describing the soft-ball stage of cooked sugar. If you tried to cook this mixture to a golden or amber caramel as we know it now, it'd be almost impossible once you put the cocoa powder in there to get it to the proper stage by look and feel alone. You'd really need a decent candy thermometer.

Strange how they don't call it fudge, though, even when it clearly is; usage of the word for chocolate candy dates back at least as far as 1895. But maybe that was really localised to Vassar at the time. Hrrrm.

[(Anonymous)]

Exactly.

It never came to the soft-boil stage (which makes me wonder about the differences in chocolate from then to now). I would have liked to have the caramel harden on the ice cream, but I think I prefer being able to eat this with a spoon.

Re: nomenclature--I've come across other foods which don't seem to have the same meaning as they do today...ironically the one that comes to mind is something else with chocolate. I have several chocolate cake recipes from the late 19th C-early 20th C which are white/yellow cakes with chocolate icing. And there were fudge recipes here, so I'm thinking I messed up somehow--maybe the wrong chocolate maybe the wrong conversions.


j

[magedragonfire.livejournal.com]

Hmm. The amounts of milk and unsweetened chocolate in the original recipe gives me pause, too, upon looking at it further. Adding a certain amount of water to chocolate once it's melted will cause it to seize, which is probably what happened with the clump that you first ended up with before thinning it. Possibly they were using a different ratio of cocoa-to-cocoa butter in the 1900s chocolate, or maybe it's a milk fat percentage thing, even.

Looking at more modern hardening fudge sauce recipes (http://www.epicurious.com/recipes/food/views/old-fashioned-hot-fudge-sauce-12120), the ratios of ingredients are also incredibly different. Wonder if the quarts of chocolate given in the original recipe was actually supposed to be ounces?

It's all very curious! And makes me want to try out a couple of different variations on your recipes and see what happens. Maybe the next time I make ice cream, mmm.

I have heard of that chocolate cake thing before! Probably noted in Sax's Classic Home Desserts (which is a fabulous resource for old-timey baking). Which just brings up more questions about the availability of cocoa powder at the time, and... Patisserie history and science are just dangerous topics for me, hahah.

[marfisa.livejournal.com]

When was the term "devil's food cake" for all-chocolate cake introduced? It seemed to be a pretty standard term for it during the 1960's and '70's (possibly due to the popularity of Drake's [chocolate with vanilla cream between the two layers] Devil Dogs, which I'm not sure are even made any more). Then suddenly in the mid-1980's/1990's when you mentioned devil's food cake to young grocery store clerks, etc., they had no clue what you meant. The same thing happened with skim milk, which you now had to ask for under the name "fat-free milk," even though some dairies still used the "skim" terminology on their labels. At least, that's the way it was in New York City.

[magedragonfire.livejournal.com]

Hmm, good question. I have a feeling that the phasing out of the phrase you mention is pretty regional - I mean, I'm a product of the 80s, and devil's food cake has always been in my family's parlance, at least, and you can still buy boxed devil's food cake mixes in the grocery stores up here. (And skim milk is still known as such here (Vancouver, Canada), too, for that matter. Doesn't matter if it comes in a bag or not. :P)

I did a bit of scouring, and it looks like "devil's cake" may have first been used in publication as a name for a chocolate cake batter in the 1903 edition of The Settlement Cookbook - source here (https://books.google.ca/books?id=uioOx6UHZkcC&pg=PA144&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q&f=false). The 'food' bit was probably added later to make it a truly 'opposite' version of angel's food cake, which was around in the late 1800s.

Devil's food as a term looks like it lost some of its distinction once bakers started varying the use of melted chocolate and cocoa powder to make their cakes. The cocoa, in particular, gives it that deeper, darker chocolate colour and flavour, and with a bit of extra baking soda also gives it that fluffy quality that makes it comparable to angel's food cake.

[marfisa.livejournal.com]

Re the Dominion Day activities: Was there also an unmarried women's dash? Or did running in public present such a pronounced risk of allowing male onlookers a glimpse of one's lower limbs that it was felt that only women who were already respectably married could withstand the potential threat to their reputations?

Or possibly "married women's dash" was more of a euphemistically-phrased age-based category intended to exclude teenage girls under eighteen or so, without actually forcing any of the female participants to admit to being over a certain age in public.

I assume "burlesque baseball" involved deliberate pratfalls and clowning around, not stripping or the strategic placement of oversized ostrich-feather fans.