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Boiled Cake (Eggless)
1 cup cold water 1 cup raisins 1 cup sugar ½ cup butter 1 teaspoon cinnamon 1 teaspoon cloves 1 teaspoon baking powder 2 cups Five Roses flour Pour the first seven ingredients into a saucepan and bring to boiling point, then cool. When cold, stir in the sifted flour and beat well. Turn into a buttered cake tin.
A boiled raisin cake of the wartime type, where the fruit, fat and spice are simmered together before the flour goes in. The printed ingredient list has picked up a stray line from the neighbouring recipe.
- Ignore the last lineThe trailing "1 cup sugar 2 eggs" is a stray line from an adjacent recipe on the page. This cake is eggless by design and takes no second cup of sugar.
- Hold back the baking powderThe instruction to boil all seven ingredients together will spend most of the leavening before the flour ever arrives. Sift the teaspoon of baking powder with the flour and stir it into the cooled syrup instead.
- Let it go properly coldWarm syrup melts the butter into the flour and gives a greasy, heavy crumb, and it will start the baking powder working on the bench. Cool to room temperature, which takes about an hour, or spread it in a shallow bowl to speed things.
- Boiling time"Bring to boiling point" means a minute or two at a simmer, long enough to plump the raisins and dissolve the sugar. A hard, long boil reduces the water and the batter comes out stiff.
- Oven and tinNo temperature is given; the instruction is only "Bake." Bake at 350F. An 8-inch square or a 9x5 loaf tin, buttered and lined, needs 40 to 50 minutes; the cake is done when a skewer comes out clean and the top springs back.
- FlourFive Roses was a hard-wheat Canadian all-purpose flour. Ordinary all-purpose works directly; measure by spooning into the cup and levelling, as 2 cups scooped from the bag can be 30 g heavier than intended.
- SpiceA full teaspoon of ground cloves is assertive by current taste. Half a teaspoon is closer to modern expectation, with the cinnamon left as written.
- Yield and keepingOne loaf, about ten slices. Boiled cakes are better on the second day and keep a week wrapped, since the sugar syrup and raisins hold moisture in the absence of eggs.
Boiled cakes belong to a family of eggless, milkless bakes that go under names like war cake, poor man's cake and boiled raisin cake, and they turn up in North American cookbooks whenever eggs and butter were dear or rationed. The method is older than the First World War, but it spread widely during it, when Canadian and American households were urged to save eggs, wheat and fat for export. The Five Roses Cook Book was published by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company of Montreal and Winnipeg to promote its Five Roses flour, and it presented itself as compiled from recipes sent in by home cooks across the country. The instructions are telegraphic, as was standard in the period: "Bake" assumes a reader who already knows her own oven. The boiling step does real work, dissolving the sugar and softening the raisins so the cake stays moist without the binding and lift that eggs would otherwise supply.