Twentieth-Century Cake Preferences

The twentieth century saw new preferences in butter cakes, as well as new uses. Of the three original modern butter cakes, only white cake still stirred home bakers’ souls. It was the basic building block of the surviving fancy company layer cakes, like the fruit-and-nut-filled “Lady Baltimore cake” and the various coconut-lemon cakes, and often of simpler family layer cakes too. Yellow butter cake was now an everyday cake, less often layered than baked (and sometimes served) in a square or rectangular pan and topped with a simple frosting. Gold cake was rarely baked at all. The conqueror of the butter cakes was chocolate cake, which was recreated, mostly in test kitchens, in “devil’s food,” “fudge,” and “buttermilk” iterations, each in uncountable different chocolate intensities and textures, to make cakes of all the extant forms, suited to every conceivable occasion, decked out with a variety of new chocolate fillings, frostings, glazes, and baked-on toppings. Not especially fond of chocolate cake herself, Joy of Cooking author Irma Rombauer, in 1943, observed its phenomenal rise with rueful resignation: “After entertaining, I often wonder whether it is worth while to bake anything else. … Undoubtedly, chocolate cake has ‘it.’ ”