An American invention: Red velvet cake

The non-violent overthrow of Czechoslovakia's communist government in 1999 was called the Velvet Revolution; growing up in St. Louis, the preferred ice cream of my youth was called Velvet Freeze; and the late crooner Mel Torme was called the Velvet Fog (or to those who weren't fans, the Velvet Frog.)

But to me the most deserving object of the sobriquet "velvet" is red velvet cake -- a rich relative of devil's food cake only with a distinctive red color and frosted with white icing for contrast.

Red velvet cake was all the rage years ago, but its popularity has faded since the 1970s amid safety concerns about the red food coloring used back then to tint the cake. Even Rose Levy Beranbaum, the so-called "diva of desserts," makes no mention of it what-so-ever in "The Cake Bible," her cookbook that purports to tell you everything you'd ever need to know about cakes.

Perhaps it's time to bring back red velvet cake. Today's red food coloring is perfectly safe and after all, the cake is a uniquely American invention.

For that matter, Suzanne Scott of the New Jersey Baker's Board of Trade suggests that devil's food cake itself, the parent of red velvet cake, is a strictly U.S. creation. The name, as John Mariani explains in his "Dictionary of American Food and Drink," refers to the fact that the cake is so rich it's positively sinful.

Originally devil's food cake was not so much chocolate brown as reddish brown (in fact, it was sometimes called red devil's cake) because it used the lighter natural cocoa powder rather than the more recently developed darker alkalized kind (called Dutch process because it was invented by Conrad van Houten, a Dutchman.)

As food historian Linda Stradley on her "What's Cooking America" Web site notes, when using the more modern processed dark cocoa, some cooks striving for an authenticity attempt to restore the original tint of devil's food cake by resorting to food coloring. Perhaps red velvet cake was merely the result of overzealousness in this regard.

Whatever the case, we'll probably never know who the first person was to create a red velvet cake. The recipe is what culinary professionals call a "grass roots" recipe, meaning it's the sort found frequently in community cookbooks rather than in cookbooks written by experts. It can be difficult to pin it down to a particular source.

Nonetheless, there was a story making the rounds years ago that tied the cake to the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel. Presumably it was a specialty of Oscar's restaurant there and when a diner, who couldn't get enough of it, asked for the recipe -- she was promptly given it. Soon after, she received in the mail a bill for $100.

Outraged at the charge (seeing red, you might say), she circulated as many copies of the recipe as she could in an attempt to get even. The recipe for the cake -- sometimes called Waldorf-Astoria Cake or One Hundred Dollar Cake -- spread far and wide.

The tale, which suspiciously has the same plot line as a more contemporary legend about a $250 Neiman-Marcus cookie recipe, is clearly just another urban myth. The Waldorf's golden anniversary cookbook, published in 1981, makes no mention of the cake and the hotel's archives contain no record of it either.

So we'll never know just who created the red velvet cake. I, for one, am tickled pink that someone did.

Red Velvet Brownies

I didn't think you could improve on red velvet cake, until I developed this recipe for red velvet brownies. Try it and see if you don't agree.

Ingredients:

3 and 1/2 sticks butter

2 bottles (1 oz. each) red food coloring

1 egg

1/2 cup water

1 box (18 oz.) German chocolate cake mix

1 and 1/2 cups chopped walnuts

3 tablespoons flour

1 cup milk

1 cup sugar

1 teaspoon vanilla

Directions: Melt 1 and 1/2 sticks butter. Combine with food coloring, egg, and water. Add cake mix and stir until smooth. Fold in nuts. Bake in greased 9-by-13-inch pan at 325 degrees for 30 minutes. Do not over bake. Let cool.

Cook flour and milk over medium heat until thickened. Cool completely. Cream remaining 2 sticks butter and sugar until white and fluffy. Add flour mixture by the tablespoonful, then vanilla, and beat for 10 minutes. Frost brownies.

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