Chocolate Cake

A popular Philadelphia cookbook author, Eliza Leslie, published the earliest known chocolate cake recipe in 1847 in The Lady’s Receipt Book. Unlike chocolate cakes we know today, this recipe used chopped or grated chocolate. Other cooks of the time such as Sarah Tyson Rorer and Maria Parloa all made contributions to the development of the chocolate cake and were prolific authors of cookbooks.

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.

While not a cake in our sense today, here is a recipe from Mary Randolph’s The Virginia Housewife (1824) for Chocolate Cake to be eaten with a cup of chocolate:

Chocolate Cakes
Put half a pound of nice brown sugar into a quart of flour, sift it, and make it into a paste, with four ounces of butter melted in as much milk as will wet it; knead it till light, roll it tolerably thin, cut it in strips an inch wide, and just long enough to lay in a plate; bake them on a griddle, put them in the plate in rows to checker each other, and serve them to eat with chocolate.
- Mary Randolph’s The Virginia Housewife (1824)

Chocolate Cake
from Eliza Leslies’ 1847 book, The Ladies Reciept Book

The earliest known chocolate cake recipe.

CHOCOLATE CAKE.—Scrape down three ounces of the best and purest chocolate, or prepared cocoa. Cut up, into a deep pan, three-quarters of a pound of fresh butter; add to it a pound of powdered loaf-sugar; and stir the butter and sugar together till very light and white. Have ready fourteen ounces (two ounces less than a pound) of sifted flour; a powdered nutmeg; and a tea-spoonful of powdered cinnamon—mixed together. Beat the whites of ten eggs till they stand alone; then the yolks till they are very thick and smooth. Then mix the yolks and whites gradually together, beating very hard when they are all mixed. Add the eggs, by degrees, to the beaten butter and sugar, in turn with the flour and the scraped chocolate,—a little at a time of each; also the spice. Stir the whole very hard. Put the mixture into a buttered tin pan with straight sides, and bake it at least four hours. If nothing is to be baked afterwards, let it remain in till the oven becomes cool. When cold, ice it.

from https://revolutionarypie.com/: "Eliza Leslie is often credited with the first chocolate cake recipe, published in The Ladies’ Receipt-Book (1847). She used grated chocolate in the batter, so it had a speckled appearance. I tried to make Leslie’s cake, but it turned out much too dense, perhaps because there was no baking soda or powder in the recipe, just lots of eggs for leavening."

from Sarah Tyson Rorer’s 1886 book, Mrs. Rorer’s Philadelphia Cook Book, founder of the Philadelphia Cooking School

CHOCOLATE CAKE. - Scrape down three ounces of the best and purest chocolate;, or prepared cocoa. Cut up, into a deep pan, three-quarters of a pound of fresh butter; add to it a pound of powdered loaf-sugar; and stir the butter and sugar together till very light and white. Have ready fourteen ounces (two ounces less than a pound) of sifted flour; a powdered nutmeg; and a tea-spoonful of powdered cinnamon - mixed together. Beat the whites of ten eggs till they stand alone; then the yolks till they are thick and smooth. Then mix the yolks and whites gradually together, beating very hard when they are all mixed. Add the eggs, by degrees, to the beaten butter and sugar, in turn with the flour and the scraped chocolate, - a little at a time of each; also the spice. Stir the whole very hard. Put the mixture into a buttered tin pan with straight sides, and bake it at least four hours. If nothing is to be baked afterwards, let it remain in till the oven becomes cool. When cold, ice it.

from https://revolutionarypie.com/: "Some consider Mrs. Rorer’s recipe to be the first modern-day chocolate cake, since it used melted chocolate (so the chocolate was fully incorporated in the batter) and baking powder, which had become more widely available over the course of the 19th century. The recipe contains just two ounces of chocolate, perhaps because it was still fairly expensive. Later recipes, including one for devil’s food cake in 1905, would contain twice as much." [Devil's Food Cakes were called such due to the extra chocolate they contained.] "My family loved this cake. My husband said it was nice and moist, although he would have been happier if it had contained more chocolate. But my daughter and I appreciated that it was, as she put it, 'a mellow cake — chocolatey, but not rich or overwhelming.'”