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Banana Cake
1 cup granulated sugar ¼ cup butter ⅔ cup milk 2 eggs 2 cups Five Roses flour 1 teaspoon vanilla extract Bake in layers, and put sliced bananas between. Any frosting.
A terse layer-cake formula of the kind that filled early Five Roses pages, where readers were assumed to know the standard method. Two things need attention before you start: the leavening and the assembly.
- The missing leaveningTwo cups of flour with two eggs and no chemical raising agent will bake dense and close-grained rather than as a light layer cake. Recipes of this type usually call for about 2 teaspoons of baking powder for this quantity of flour, and the omission here may well be a printing slip.
- Method the book leaves outThe standard order for this style is cream butter and sugar, beat in the eggs, then add the sifted flour (with baking powder and a pinch of salt) alternately with the milk, vanilla last. A quarter cup of butter to a cup of sugar is a lean ratio, so cream it thoroughly.
- FlourFive Roses was a hard-wheat all-purpose flour, and modern all-purpose works directly. Measure by spooning into the cup and levelling rather than scooping, which can add 20 percent.
- Pans and ovenThe batter fills two 8-inch round layers. Bake at 350F for 22 to 28 minutes, until a tester comes out clean and the edges just pull from the pan.
- The bananasSlice them only when the layers are fully cool and you are ready to serve. Sliced banana browns within the hour and weeps, which will soak the crumb; a brush of lemon juice slows it but does not stop it.
- "Any frosting"A boiled white icing or a simple butter icing both suit it. Frost the top and sides only, with bananas as the sole filling, or the layers will slide.
- YieldEight to ten slices. Best eaten the day it is assembled.
The Five Roses Cook Book was published by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company, whose head office was in Montreal, and distributed to purchasers of its Five Roses flour; the recipes were contributed by Canadian users of the flour, which may account for the confident brevity and the occasional gap like the missing baking powder here. Bananas reached Canadian and American cities in quantity as steamship and rail shipment from Central America developed in the late nineteenth century, and by the 1910s they were common enough to appear in everyday baking. Note that this is not banana cake in the later sense of mashed overripe fruit worked into the batter — that style is generally associated with the interwar decades and the recipe pamphlets of the period. This is a plain butter layer cake used as a vehicle for fresh fruit, closer in spirit to a strawberry shortcake than to modern banana bread.