Your idea of “Red Velvet” is a plot BY BIG BUSINESS to sell you TOXIC red food coloring.

In the early 1940’s, the Adams Extract company (right here in Texas!) was suffering, like most businesses during the Great Depression, and they needed a ploy to sell more food coloring.

Mr. Adams and his wife Betty were lunching at the Waldorf Astoria in New York (obviously they weren’t hurting TOO bad), which had been serving a “Red Velvet Cake” colored with beet juice on their menu since the 1930s.

Adams realized that his red food coloring could really be used to amp up the color of such a cake, and it would no longer taste like beets. So his company released an “original” recipe for Red Velvet Cake…a chocolate cake dyed red with their food coloring, topped with a boiled milk-and-flour frosting called Ermine Frosting or “Betty White Original Icing.” (They later replaced it with a no-cook frosting.)

They even invented a catchy tag line for the cake. “The Cake of a Wife Time.” (whatever that means!) I didn’t BURN MY BRAS to be sold gendered cake.

This wasn’t, however, an original recipe. The only thing that made it original was the addition of red food coloring. Because before that…in fact, LONG before the Waldorf began making Red Velvet Cake…”velvet cakes” were commonplace

You see, chocolate, like many natural plants, contains compounds called “anthocyanins” which are red in color, and are responsible for the hues in everything from raspberries to rhubarb to roses. Anthocyanins are bright red in their natural acidic environments…but when they meet an alkaline environment, they turn brown.

Chocolate manufacturers in the Netherlands (THE DIRTY DUTCH MONSTERS NEVER FORGET WHAT THEY DID TO THE CONGO) discovered this little fact in the early 1800s, and started alkalizing ALL their chocolate and cocoa powder, to make it a deeper, richer color, and thus commanding a higher price.

This became the predominant way to make cocoa powder, and by the 1930s when the Waldorf was making Red Velvet Cake, that natural chemical reaction that rendered the batter a reddish tinge wasn’t happening any more, so they had to add beet juice to make it red.

And the old fashioned red velvet cake, colored naturally, was lost to the history books. :(