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Butternut Cake
1 cup sugar ½ cup butter ¼ cup sweet milk 2 eggs 2 cups Five Roses flour ½ cup butternut meats (chopped) ½ cup raisins 2 teaspoons baking powder.
Like much of the Five Roses Cook Book, this is a formula rather than a method: the proportions are given and the cook is expected to know what to do with them. Here is what the list assumes.
- The missing methodCream the butter and sugar, beat in the eggs, add the milk, then the flour sifted with the baking powder, and fold in the nuts and raisins last, dusted with a little of the flour so they do not sink. The batter will be stiff — closer to a pound cake than a layer cake — which is correct for this quantity of liquid.
- Butternut meatsButternut is the white walnut, Juglans cinerea, native to eastern Canada and the northeastern states and once gathered wild. It is now scarce through butternut canker and effectively unavailable commercially. English walnut is the closest substitute in texture; black walnut gives a stronger, more resinous flavour than the original would have had.
- Sweet milkPlain fresh whole milk, specified to distinguish it from the soured milk or buttermilk used in recipes leavened with saleratus. Since the leavening here is baking powder, no acid is wanted.
- The flourFive Roses was a hard spring-wheat flour from the Lake of the Woods mills, stronger than modern all-purpose. Measure the 2 cups by spooning and levelling rather than scooping, or the cake will be dry.
- SaltNone is listed, which was common when butter was salted as a matter of course. With unsalted butter add ¼ teaspoon.
- Pan and ovenThe recipe gives no oven direction; this is modern guidance. Bake in a greased and floured 8-inch square pan or a 9x5 loaf tin at about 350">F for 35 to 45 minutes, until a skewer comes out clean. The nuts and raisins mean the centre sets slowly, so test before pulling it.
- YieldAbout 12 to 16 small squares, or one modest loaf. It keeps well wrapped for several days and improves on the second day.
The Five Roses Cook Book was published by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company and distributed to buyers of its flour, filled largely with recipes sent in by Canadian housewives — which explains the terse, ingredients-only entries, written by cooks for cooks who already knew how to make a cake. Butternut belongs squarely to that world: the tree grows through Ontario, Quebec and into New Brunswick, and its nuts were gathered rather than bought, so a cook with a butternut in the yard had a free ingredient every autumn. The husks and hulls were also a long-standing home dye source, giving the tan colour generally traced to Confederate "butternut" uniforms. The tree has since been devastated by butternut canker and is listed as endangered in Canada, which makes this cake a small record of a nut that has largely dropped out of the kitchen.