Home › Cake Making and Baking › Cake (Cups Five Roses flour cup)
Cake (Cups Five Roses flour cup)
1 cup brown sugar 2 cups Five Roses flour ½ cup sweet milk 2 eggs (beaten separately) 1 teaspoon soda Cream butter, sugar and yolks of eggs.
Add milk. Sift flour and whites of eggs beaten stiff. Beat all and add custard.
Add last 1 teaspoon soda dissolved in little warm water.
Ice with marshmallow frosting.
This is a fragment of a longer entry — the ingredient list gives flour, milk, eggs and soda, while the method calls for butter, sugar and a custard that were never quantified. Treat it as a skeleton to be fleshed out from a standard butter-cake formula rather than a complete recipe.
- The missing quantitiesFor 2 cups of flour and ½ cup milk, a period butter cake of this type would run to roughly ½ cup butter and 1 cup sugar, though the original gives neither. The "custard" is unexplained: nothing in the ingredient list accounts for it, and it may belong to an adjacent recipe on the original page.
- Sweet milkPlain whole milk, as opposed to the sour or buttermilk that older recipes call for by name. The distinction mattered because it determined whether soda alone would do the leavening.
- Soda with nothing to react withA teaspoon of baking soda in sweet milk has no acid to work against, so it will leave a soapy taste and a yellowish crumb. Either the original assumed sour milk, or the omitted custard or a cream of tartar was carrying the acid. Modern practice would use 2 teaspoons baking powder instead.
- Eggs beaten separatelyYolks go into the creamed butter and sugar; the whites are beaten stiff and added at the end with the flour. Despite the instruction to "beat all," the whites are best folded rather than beaten in, or they will collapse.
- OvenThe recipe gives no baking instruction. A modern equivalent would be about 350F; two 8-inch layers take roughly 22 to 28 minutes, a single 9-inch pan closer to 35.
- Marshmallow frostingThe period version is a boiled sugar syrup poured into beaten egg whites, sometimes with gelatine or actual marshmallows melted in. It is close to what would now be called an Italian meringue frosting, and is often grouped with seven-minute frosting; it sets with a skin over a soft interior.
- YieldTwo thin 8-inch layers, serving eight to ten.
The Five Roses Cook Book was issued by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company of Montreal and Winnipeg, one of the great Canadian flour millers, and it belongs to a genre — the branded flour cookbook — that filled North American kitchens in the early twentieth century. Recipes came in from customers across the country and were printed in bulk, often with minimal editing, which is why entries like this one arrive with half their measurements missing and a stray reference to a custard that appears nowhere in the list. The crowded layout of these books, with several short recipes to a column, may well have made such collisions easier. The larger point of the book was to sell flour.