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Buttermilk Cake
1 cup butter 2 cups sugar 2 cups buttermilk 5 cups Five Roses flour 1 pound raisins 1 teaspoon soda 1 teaspoon cinnamon 1 nutmeg Pinch of salt.
Cream the butter and sugar, add spices and salt. Then add the buttermilk with the soda dissolved in it. Lastly, add the flour mixed with raisins. Bake in moderate oven 1 hour. Other fruits and spices can be added to taste.
A large, eggless buttermilk fruit cake of the kind kept for a week in a tin. The proportions are generous and the instructions assume a cook who knows what a cake batter should look like, so a few numbers are worth pinning down.
- Moderate ovenUsually taken as about 350F (period sources range from roughly 325 to 375). At that heat one hour suits loaf-sized pans; a single deep cake from this quantity of batter will likely need longer, so test with a skewer.
- This is a big cakeFive cups of flour, two cups of buttermilk and a pound of raisins make something over two quarts of batter. Divide it between two 9x5-inch loaf pans or bake in a 10-inch tube pan. One 9-inch round will overflow.
- One nutmegA whole nutmeg grated yields about 2 to 3 teaspoons, which is assertive by current taste. Half a nutmeg with the teaspoon of cinnamon gives a cake most people today will find better balanced.
- Five Roses flourA Canadian hard-wheat flour, stronger than most modern American all-purpose. Ordinary all-purpose works; the crumb will simply be a little more tender. Bread flour is best avoided in a cake batter of this kind.
- No eggs, and only sodaThe single teaspoon of soda reacting with two cups of buttermilk is all the lift there is. Dissolve it in the buttermilk as directed and get the cake into the oven promptly, because the gas begins escaping at once.
- Flouring the raisinsThe recipe mixes the raisins into the measured flour rather than folding them into the batter. Coating fruit this way is the usual means of keeping a pound of it from sinking through a batter with no eggs to hold it up.
- MixingAdd flour-and-raisins last and stop as soon as no dry streaks remain. This is a stiff mixture and overworking a strong flour at this stage gives a tough, tunnelled crumb.
- Yield and keepingTwo loaves, about 20 slices. Wrapped well it improves over two or three days and keeps a week at room temperature.
The Five Roses Cook Book was published by Lake of the Woods Milling Company as advertising for its flour. Buttermilk cake belongs to the long tradition of eggless, soda-raised cakes that were common in North American home baking from the mid-nineteenth century onward: buttermilk was the by-product of churning and cost little on a farm, while eggs were seasonal and often sold rather than eaten. The acid in the buttermilk reacting with soda did some of the work that beaten eggs would otherwise do, and such recipes appear to have grown more common as commercial baking soda became cheap and reliable. The closing line — "Other fruits and spices can be added to taste" — leaves the recipe as a framework rather than a fixed formula.