History of Red Velvet

Photo Credit: Taste of Southern

Zhou and I have decided to make red velvet cookies, as it is a very favored and well-known flavor in the dessert world. It is even the most popular flavor people order for cheesecake at the Cheesecake Factory! As a classic, red velvet cake, or “Waldorf red cake” is a cake with a surprising chocolate flavor, as the shade of red from the usage of food coloring often misleads people. There is no definite origin as to where the idea of “red velvet” came from, but Southerners claimed that the cake emerged in the South during the Civil War; individuals in New York protested that it was created at the hotel Waldorf-Astoria in the 1950s. However, it was for sure that American newspapers began publishing Red Devil’s Food cakes in the 1930s.
The most known and accepted backstory of red velvet cake was in the 1900s, during the Great Depression. The Adams Extract Company, a company that produced food coloring and dyes, attempted to persuade Americans to purchase their products by advertising new methods of utilizing their dyes. The company coaxed customers with photos of cakes that were colored red and provided a cake recipe as a bonus with the bargain of their red dye.

Did you know the red velvet cakes were not intentionally colored red? Others believed that a chemical reaction between the ingredients produced a subtle, rust-brown color - hence the “red” aspect of the name. “Velvet” was a word to describe a fine crumb texture.