My go-to chocolate cake recipe owes a lot to the late, great Edna Lewis, even though when I developed it, I didn’t know it. The Easy Chocolate I honed through years of baking both at home and in professional kitchens shares a lot of DNA with the “Very Good Chocolate Cake,” included in The Gift of Southern Cooking, which she co-authored with Scott Peacock. I suspect many of us owe a great deal to her (and his) baking wisdom whether we know it or not.

I only recently encountered the recipe when it popped up in Anne Byrn’s excellent Substack, and as I read through the ingredients I recognized the cake instantly despite never having made it. The ingredient list has the strong-brewed coffee I always turn to, the richness of sour cream too, and also favors vegetable oil over butter. (The headnote says using oil instead of butter was typical of some Deep South recipes, especially peanut oil.)

I lean on Dutch-process cocoa powder rather than unsweetened chocolate like this recipe does, and use both baking soda as well as powder. (Byrn notes in her Substack that the recipe likely predates baking powder.) It uses cake flour, but I typically can’t be bothered, so mine calls for all-purpose. Neither of our recipes call for a mixer; the cakes can be stirred together by hand.

Reading through the instructions was a good reminder that recipes drift through time and the kitchens of folks everywhere, morphing as they move, but still staying fundamentally the same. 

When I was first learning to use hot brewed coffee in my chocolate cakes, I’d never made one of Edna Lewis or Scott Peacock’s recipes. I was many miles north in Seattle, Washington, baking for a restaurant where three layer Southern-style cakes were the speciality (I quickly learned the torture that is working with caramel icing).

The restaurant was a novelty of sorts for rain-hardened Seattleites who weren’t accustomed to having a good biscuit within reach. The chef, Heather Earnhardt, was a transplant from North Carolina, and introduced this corner of the Pacific Northwest to the joys of Boonville flour, Steen’s cane syrup, and Benton’s bacon.

And indirectly she taught me about the cooking of many Southern greats, from contemporaries like Edward Lee, to legends like Edna Lewis and Scott Peacock. After a few years working for Southern Living, the influence is now unmistakably clear. (And if it weren’t, a little fact-checking reveals my former boss cites Lewis’s books among her favorites in a 2014 article.)

I took many lessons from that job that still guide my baking today, including that most desserts are made better with buttermilk. But also that we owe those who came before us more than we often know, and not just the ones we’re related to. Give the recipe a try for yourself. I have no doubt that after one bite, you’ll understand how it earned its name.