It started out as a cake, and is still most commonly known as a cake, but “devil’s food” has also become a flavor name that can be used to describe any moist, chocolaty, baked good. Where did this curious name come from?
In 1902 the first published recipes for devil’s food cake appeared, one in Mrs. Rorer’s New Cook Book, and the other in The New Dixie Receipt Book (in the latter, it was subtitled “Fit for Angels!”). Prior to the 1880s, chocolate was not a common ingredient in cake-baking in the United States. In fact, chocolate was thought of as little more than the key ingredient to the warm beverage—that is, hot chocolate—until the late 1870s, when improvements in processing cocoa resulted in a much smoother and more delicious chocolate, suitable to be eaten on its own. Subsequently, a nationwide craze for eating chocolate took off, and chocolate eased its way into the baker’s pantry, first as a flavoring for frosting—in the 1880s and early 1890s, “chocolate cake” for the most part implied a yellow cake with chocolate frosting. As recipes for cakes with chocolate in the actual batter began to appear, we can presume that a new name was warranted, in order to differentiate from the less-chocolaty chocolate cakes of the past. Indeed, chocolate-batter cake recipes published prior to 1902 often had modifiers in their titles, such as Miriam Cooper’s “black chocolate cake” published in The Home Queen Cookbook in 1898. As for the term “devil’s food,” one has to note that angel food cake, a snowy-white, light sponge cake with little or no cooking fat, had already been popular for several decades. Considering the degree to which the new rich, dark chocolate cake was a polar opposite of angel food cake; and given the use of the culinary term “deviled” to refer to a dark or richly spiced dish; and finally, given the general whimsy with which cakes born of the nineteenth century were named, the evolution of devil’s food was all but inevitable.
