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Cherry Cake
2 eggs. 3/4 cup sugar. ½ cup butter 2 tablespoons water 1 cup cherries 1 teaspoon soda 2 cups (small) Five Roses flour Bake as usual. Ice with any frosting.
This entry is one of the terse ones — the Five Roses book often assumed a cook who already knew how a plain cake went together, and printed only what distinguished this one. Read as written, the ingredient list is incomplete, so treat it as a sketch to be fitted onto a standard creamed butter cake rather than a set of instructions.
- What is missingThere is no sugar, no egg and no leavening beyond the soda, and 2 tablespoons of water will not hydrate 2 cups of flour. A cake of this shape in the period would take roughly 1 cup sugar and 2–3 eggs creamed with the ½ cup butter, plus milk or cherry juice to bring it to a dropping batter. Anyone baking it will be reconstructing, not following.
- "2 cups (small)"The "(small)" presumably signals a cup smaller than a full measuring cup, so read the flour as scant, perhaps something like 1¾ standard cups, around 215 g. The recipe itself does not define the measure. Flour was also softer and less uniformly milled than modern all-purpose.
- Soda without acidA teaspoon of soda needs something sour to work against — sour milk, buttermilk or the syrup from preserved cherries. With sweet milk and water alone it will leave a soapy taste and a yellowish crumb. If the liquid is not acidic, baking powder is the leavening the recipe actually wants.
- The cherriesIn a 1910s Canadian kitchen this most likely means preserved or candied cherries, or home-canned sour cherries well drained. Fresh sweet cherries carry far more water and will sink and sog the crumb; halve, dry them and toss with a spoonful of the measured flour before folding in.
- "Bake as usual"The recipe gives no temperature at all. For a butter cake of this size a moderate oven, roughly 350°F in modern terms, in a greased and papered 8-inch round or a small loaf tin, 40–50 minutes until a straw comes out clean, is a reasonable fit. The phrase was workable because wood and coal ranges had no dial; the cook judged by hand and by such tests as how quickly a little flour browned in the oven.
- Yield and icingOne 8-inch layer or a small loaf, eight to ten slices. "Any frosting" simply sends the cook to whatever icing she used; a boiled white icing or a plain confectioners' sugar and water glaze would suit, and both set firm enough to keep the cake a day or two under a cloth.
The Five Roses Cook Book was published by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company of Winnipeg and Montreal, and like most miller's books of its era it was as much an advertisement as a kitchen manual — flour measures are given by brand name. Its recipes were gathered from Canadian housewives, which may go some way toward explaining an entry as terse as this one. Cherry cake itself is a British inheritance, generally traced to the Victorian habit of studding a plain pound or Madeira batter with glacé cherries, which came into wide domestic use once candied fruit became cheap and shelf-stable. In prairie Canada, where fresh fruit was seasonal and brief, a jar of preserved cherries turned into a cake was a way of putting summer on the table in February.