Why Is Red Velvet Cake Red? Cocoa, Beets or Food Coloring

Velvet came first, then cocoa

In the 1800s, a velvet cake simply meant one with a soft, fine crumb, pastry chef and historian Stella Parks told The Splendid Table. Around 1911, that idea merged with devil's food cake into a velvet cocoa cake, made with cocoa powder instead of chocolate. As it moved south, it was often made with buttermilk.

That is why red velvet still tastes like a cousin of our devil's food cake: less cocoa, more tang. Parks says "red devil" was an early name that set the lighter cake apart from nearly black devil's food.

The cocoa chemistry, and its limits

The first red was really reddish brown. Parks explains that the cocoa of the time was unroasted and acidic, and with buttermilk it brought out a reddish-brown crumb; Texas Highways calls the older cakes a mahogany shade, said to come from cocoa reacting with vinegar or buttermilk. A 1930s food scientist described the color as red-brown, Parks says, but newspapers kept the red and dropped the brown.

Modern cocoa will not do the same trick. Parks says today's roasted cocoa does not produce the effect. Even the old natural version was more burgundy than fire-engine red.

A Texas bottle of red

The bright red was a marketing campaign. Adams Extract, founded in Michigan in 1888, moved to Austin, Texas, in 1922. In 1947, John G. Adams created the company's four-pack of red, blue, green and yellow food colors, and to sell it the company printed a red velvet recipe developed by his wife, Betty Adams, on cards handed out in stores, Texas Highways reports.

Parks points to a 1940s recipe calling for four ounces of red coloring as the moment red velvet took off. Texas Highways also notes that some earlier recipes used beets to deepen the color. Beets may have helped at times, but the vivid red that spread nationally came from dye.

The $100 recipe that never happened

You may have heard that a woman asked the Waldorf-Astoria for its red velvet recipe and got a bill for $100. Hoaxes.org traces that tale to a 1945 Time magazine item that named no hotel and no red cake. By 1949 the Waldorf was the villain and the recipe was a fudge cake; a 1964 version finally made it red velvet. King Arthur Baking says the story has no apparent truth.

The frosting is its own argument. King Arthur notes the traditional topping was a cooked flour icing, the kind often called ermine, while many bakers now prefer cream cheese. Our red velvet cake follows King Arthur's buttercream and gets its color from the bottle, not the cocoa. Weigh it against devil's food in our red velvet vs devil's food debate, or find it among our Valentine's Day recipes.

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