The Unexpected Origins of the Common Marble Cake

Originating in early nineteenth-century Germany, the marble cake is a relative newcomer to the Jewish baking pantheon (at least compared to such venerable sweets as honey cake).

But it turns out that marble cake as we know it is even newer than that: rather than the familiar chocolate and vanilla, the earliest variants consisted of kugelhopf (sweet yeast bread), where one half was colored with molasses and spices.

Bakers soon began to apply the technique to sponge cake batter—but the flavor profile stayed spicy, rather than chocolatey.

The cake (yes, still in its molasses-ful form) came to America with German immigrants shortly before the Civil War and the term “marble cake” was first recorded in English in the September 29, 1859, issue of the Illinois State Chronicle.

It wasn’t until the late nineteenth century, when chocolate gained a greater hold on the American public, that sponge cake as we know it today really took shape. The first known recipe to appear in an American cookbook—it featured in the memorably titled Tit-Bits: Or, How to Prepare a Nice Dish at a Moderate Expense by Mrs. S. G. Knight (Boston, 1864)—went with the spice and molasses variety, though the base was a butter cake rather than a sponge or a yeasted cake.

It wasn’t long after chocolate marble cake became a thing that it became a decidedly Jewish thing: one of the earliest recipes for this sort of marble cake appeared in one of the first American Jewish (and decidedly unkosher) cookbooks, Aunt Babette’s (Cincinnati, 1889), in which a recipe instructed cooks to “stir into [half the batter] about two heaping tablespoons of grated chocolate.”

Interestingly, in this interim period fusion chocolate-spice marble cakes gained popularity, too; the variety included in the first edition of The Settlement Cook Book (Milwaukee, 1901)—another classic of American Jewish culinary assimilationism—was flavored with grated chocolate, cinnamon, and cloves and baked in a tube pan. Eventually chocolate won out—though according to Gil Marks, at least within the past decade there were still Jewish bakeries selling spiced marble cake—with bakeries tending toward the (pareve) sponge variety, and home cooks more often inclined toward the easier, sturdier butter type.

My go-to marble cake is slightly adapted from Marcy Goldman’s recipe for an orange-infused marble loaf, but I always leave out the orange zest and juice she calls for in favor of old-school (or not so much, given that the OG marble cake was the spice variety) vanilla.

Neither a butter cake—with canola oil as the fat, this one is pareve—nor a sponge (no separating eggs required), this variation is more like a pound cake than anything else. It’s pleasingly light and moist, and it’s one of those cakes that’s even better on the second (maybe even third) day. It can be baked in a tube or bundt pan, but I always do mine as loaves.

This is not a flashy showstopper kind of cake. In a less charitable assessment, it might even be deemed boring, but I find it comforting. I grew up on this cake, and there’s just something about the simplicity of it that hits the spot for me. It’s not a cake I bake (or even think of) terribly often, but when I do make this one I’m always glad to have it around.

Marble Cake

Chocolate paste

4 tablespoons unsweetened cocoa powder

3 tablespoons warm vegetable oil

Cake

1 cup vegetable oil

2 cups granulated sugar

5 eggs

4 teaspoons vanilla extract

1 1/4 cup water

3 1/4 cups all-purpose flour

1/2 teaspoon baking soda

3 1/2 teaspoons baking powder

1/2 teaspoon salt

Preheat the oven to 350°F. Generously grease two 9 by 5-inch loaf pans. Line the bottom of the pans with parchment paper.

Prepare the chocolate paste by placing the cocoa and oil in a small bowl and blending well. Add a drop or more of oil if the mixture appears too stiff or thick to stir or blend easily.

For the cake, in a large bowl, blend the oil with the sugar, scraping the bowl often. Blend in the eggs and stir in the vanilla and water.

In a separate bowl, whisk together the flour, baking soda, baking powder, and salt. Add to the wet ingredients.

Remove one third of the batter to a smaller bowl. Stir the chocolate paste into this to make a chocolate batter. Spoon alternating portions of white and chocolate batter into the prepared pan. It doesn’t really matter how you place the batter in the pan. If you want to get fancy, once you’re done layering the batter you can stick a chopstick or knife in and swirl it a bit.

Bake for 50 to 55 minutes. The cake should be lightly browned on top, perhaps slightly cracked, and spring back when lightly pressed. Cool in the pan for 15 to 20 minutes before inverting onto a wire rack.

Sources: Encyclopedia of Jewish Food (Gil Marks, 2010); “Shabbat Mandarin Marble Loaf,” Epicurious (Marcy Goldman, September 1998)

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