Red Devil’s Cake
I found this rare little church cookbook at the Kelmscott Bookshop a few months ago. It’s got a bunch of old photographs and a brief history of a town in Maryland right on the Pennsylvania border, Bentley Springs.
“On October 4, 1837, the Baltimore and Susquehanna Railroad obtained a right-of-way from William Dorsey and leveled a path through the valley for its rails… Mr. Charles W. Bentley and Ann O., his wife, appreciating the healthful location and charming natural scenery, purchased it from Talbot Denmead… and named it Bentley Springs. It was found to possess waters of great medicinal value and was visited by hundreds every summer, until it obtained an extensive reputation as a summer resort.
The Bentleys, apparently with unlimited resources [built]… a large hotel that contained forty rooms with lavish appointments and a courtyard paved with blocks of marble…” – Bentley Springs History and Favorite Recipes
Boarding House
I couldn’t find much else about Bentley Springs aside from the information in the recipe book. Much of the town was built around supplying food and labor to the hotel. A church was built in the 1870s along with several mills that employed the townspeople.
When the hotel burned down, the boarding house (pictured above) was built in its place and the Bentleys moved away.
Like many mill towns built around the railroad boom, Bentley Springs went into a bit of decline in the automobile age. One of the paper mills burned down, followed by the beloved town store a few years later.
Despite this, the recipe book assures us, “the pleasures were many”: children playing in the snow and swimming holes, church picnics, fishing and trapping. Emphasized above all is the natural beauty, wildflowers, rocky hills and babbling brooks. The kind of scenery that makes me excited for spring.
This cake recipe was contributed to the book by “Eliza V. Smith,” who sadly does not appear in any of the photos of townspeople. A few of the same photos printed in the cookbook can be found on this site.
I believe that “Red Devil’s Cake” and the now ubiquitous Red Velvet Cake are essentially the same thing. Recipes for Red Devil’s Cake appeared in newspapers across the country in the 1920s and 1930s. The original red color of these cakes was caused by a reaction between the cocoa and the acidic sour milk. Modern cocoa tends to be Dutch processed and this reaction is a thing of the past. Most Red Velvet Cake recipes now involve red food coloring.
My cake beautification skills are pretty pitiful as you can see, but I enjoyed this moist cake with some buttercream frosting.
I’d imagine that Eliza’s Red Devil’s Cake would have been made with pride and care and brought along to one of the many picnics and revivals centered around “this little stone church in the wilderness.”
Recipe:
- 2 Cups cake flour
- 1.25 Teaspoon baking soda
- .24 Teaspoon salt
- .5 Cup butter
- 1 Cup sugar
- 2 egg
- 2 square chocolate
- 1 Teaspoon vanilla extract
- .75 Cup sour milk
- .333 Cup boiling water
1. Sift, then measure flour. Sift three times with soda and salt.
2. Cream butter until light and lemon colored. Add sugar gradually, beating after each addition until light and fluffy.
3. Slowly add the eggs which have been beaten until they are almost stiff as whipped cream. Gradually add the chocolate which has been melted and cooled.
4. Stir the vanilla into the milk. Alternately add the dry ingredients and the milk, beating until smooth after each addition. Add the boiling water and beat well.
5. Turn into greased cake pan and bake.
6. Frost, let cake stand for two hours before cutting to allow red color to develop.
Amount: 2 8 inch layers
Temperature 350° for 25-30 minutes.
Recipe from “Bentley Springs: Our History and Favorite Recipes”
