What do you think of this fact?
Chocolate sponge layers, with a thick pecan-coconut frosting between and on top: that’s German chocolate cake, an American classic. Sounds like the Black Forest, Grandma’s coffee table and old-world baking. Except the cake has nothing to do with Germany. It’s named after a man whose last name was German.
A Mr. German and his chocolate
The story takes place at the chocolate company Walter Baker & Company. There, in 1852, a man named Sam German developed a sweeter baking chocolate. The company named the product after him: “German’s Chocolate.”
And no, Sam German wasn’t German. West Texas A&M University calls him an American, while the Saturday Evening Post says he was either American or English. Both agree on one thing: he wasn’t from Germany.
A recipe from Texas
For about 100 years, German’s Chocolate stayed fairly low-key. Then a Texas homemaker sent her cake recipe to a Dallas newspaper. According to the Saturday Evening Post, it ran as the Recipe of the Day in The Dallas Morning News in June 1957.
The cake was a hit. Sales of German’s Chocolate shot up 73 percent that year, as both the Saturday Evening Post and NPR report.
The company behind the chocolate has an odd backstory of its own: starting in 1764, John Hannon and Walter Baker imported cocoa beans. In 1779, Hannon mysteriously disappeared at sea, and Baker became the sole owner of the company.
Where did the apostrophe go?
Somewhere along the way, German’s Chocolate Cake lost its apostrophe-s, NPR says. What was left, “German chocolate cake,” suddenly sounded like it came from Germany. The Saturday Evening Post suggests that copy editors who didn’t know the brand may have taken the “‘s” for a typo and cut it.
That’s how an American cake picked up a German reputation it never earned. One missing apostrophe, and Germany got the credit for a Texas hit.