National Devil’s Food Cake Day

The first recorded American recipe appeared in 1902 in 'Mrs. Rorer's New Cook Book' by Sarah Tyson Rorer, one of the most influential American cookbook writers of the era. By 1905, devil's food cake was a nationwide fixture. The defining characteristic was a chemical quirk: unsweetened cocoa powder (acidic) reacted with baking soda (basic) to produce a distinctive reddish-brown color and an exceptionally tender crumb. The color was often described in period cookbooks as 'reddish' or 'ruddy.'

Which brings us to red velvet. Before the 1940s, the cake modern Americans call "red velvet" was just a well-made devil's food cake, its color came from the natural cocoa-soda reaction. Food coloring was not yet standard. When supermarket food dye became cheap in the 1940s (and cocoa processing techniques shifted to more neutral-colored Dutch-processed cocoa), recipes started adding red food coloring to preserve the "red velvet" look. Modern red velvet cake is thus a direct descendant of early American devil's food cake, dye-assisted.

Devil's food cake became the quintessential American birthday-party chocolate cake by the 1930s, stamped into the national consciousness by Duncan Hines (who published a best-selling cake mix in 1951), Betty Crocker, and Pillsbury, all of whom sold boxed 'Devil's Food Cake' mixes as their flagship chocolate cakes. The boxed version democratized it; the scratch version survived in serious home kitchens. Either way, it has been the American chocolate-cake benchmark for 125 years and counting.

Four technical details that separate scratch from box:

Six chocolate-cake traditions in American regional cooking: