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Butterless-Milkless-Eggless Cake
2 cupfuls brown sugar 2/3 cupful Crisco 2 cupfuls water 2 cupfuls sultana raisins 2 cupfuls seeded raisins 1 teaspoonful salt 2 teaspoonfuls powdered cinnamon 1 teaspoonful powdered cloves 1/2 teaspoonful powdered mace 1/2 teaspoonful grated nutmeg 2 teaspoonfuls baking soda 4 cupfuls flour 1 teaspoonful baking powder 1 1/2 cupfuls chopped nut meats 3 tablespoonfuls warm water Put Crisco into saucepan, add sugar, water, raisins, salt, and spices, and boil three minutes. Cool, and when cold add flour, baking powder, soda dissolved in warm water and nut meats. Mix and turn into Criscoed and floured cake tin and bake in slow oven one and a half hours. Sufficient for one medium-sized cake.
A boiled-syrup fruit cake built to survive wartime shortages of butter, milk and eggs. It works, but two details decide whether it rises or sinks.
- Let the syrup go truly coldThe recipe says plainly to add the flour and dissolved soda only "when cold," and it is worth obeying: added warm, some of the soda's lift is lost before the cake reaches the oven, and the melted fat will not stay evenly distributed. An hour on the counter, or spread thin in a bowl to speed it up.
- "Slow oven"Around 300F (period usage for a slow oven spans roughly 275-325F). Hotter, and the sugar-heavy edges will darken before the center of a cake this dense is set. Ninety minutes is realistic; test with a skewer in the middle, which should come out with no wet batter clinging.
- Pan sizeFour cups of flour plus five and a half cups of fruit and nuts is a large cake, not a "medium" one by current standards. Use a 10-inch tube pan, or two 9x5 loaf pans (check loaves at about 65 minutes). A single 9-inch round will overflow.
- CriscoA 1910s all-vegetable shortening, still sold and still usable, though reformulated over the years to cut trans fat. Any solid vegetable shortening substitutes directly by volume; 2/3 cup is about 128 g. "Criscoed" simply means greased with it.
- Seeded raisinsSeeded means the seeds have been removed, from large muscat-type raisins, not that they contain seeds. Ordinary dark seedless raisins stand in. Sultanas are golden raisins.
- Baking soda and powderTwo teaspoons of soda for four cups of flour is high by modern proportion, and the only acidity to meet it comes from the brown sugar and the fruit; excess soda of this kind tends to darken the crumb and can leave a faintly alkaline edge to the spices. Dissolve it in the three tablespoons of warm water as directed so it disperses evenly through a stiff batter.
- MixingStir only until no dry flour remains. This batter is worked cold and has no eggs to hold it, so overmixing gives a tough, rubbery crumb rather than a crumbly one.
- Yield and keepingAbout 16 to 20 slices. With no dairy and a great deal of dried fruit, it should keep about a week wrapped tightly at room temperature, and such cakes are usually said to eat better the day after baking.
This is a war cake, and its title is the whole argument: butter, milk and eggs were among the household goods squeezed during the First World War, and recipes that did without them circulated heavily in newspapers, church leaflets and manufacturers' booklets. A Calendar of Dinners was written for Procter & Gamble to promote Crisco, introduced in 1911, so the eggless-milkless cake served two purposes at once: patriotic economy, and a demonstration that a vegetable shortening could do a job cooks had always given to butter. The method - boiling sugar, fat, water and dried fruit together, cooling it, then stirring in flour and soda - is the same one that produced the boiled fruit cakes and "poor man's cakes" of the Depression roughly a decade later, and it survives largely unchanged in Australian and Irish boiled fruit cake recipes today. The dried fruit holds moisture, so the cake keeps.</p>