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Date Cake
⅓ cup soft butter 1½ cups brown sugar 2 eggs ½ cup milk 1¾ cups Five Roses flour 3 teaspoons cinnamon ½ teaspoon grated nutmeg 1 teaspoon soda ½ pound stoned dates (cut finely) Mix in order given, and beat well together 3 minutes. Turn into buttered cake pan, and bake in moderate oven for 40 minutes. Remove from pan and sprinkle top with powdered sugar.
A plain spiced date loaf of the kind that fills a single square pan and keeps well. The instructions are terse even by the standards of the book, so a few numbers need filling in.
- Moderate ovenRead that as roughly 350F. Forty minutes at that heat suits an 8-inch square pan; a deeper loaf pan will take longer. Test with a skewer in the centre.
- Pan size is not givenThe batter comes to roughly 5 cups. An 8-inch square pan is the safest choice and gives a cake about an inch and a half high, which is what the 40-minute time assumes.
- "Mix in order given" is doing real workCream the butter and brown sugar first, beat in the eggs, then alternate the milk with the flour that has been sifted with the soda and spices, and fold the dates in last. Three minutes of beating in a stand mixer at medium is ample; overworked batter after the flour goes in makes the crumb tough.
- The soda needs an acidThe soda -- a teaspoon is on the generous side for the amount of flour here, though the molasses in the brown sugar supplies some acid for it to work on. Buttermilk in place of the ½ cup milk gives the soda more to react with if you prefer a lighter rise.
- Five Roses flourA Canadian hard-wheat flour, higher in protein than most American all-purpose. Ordinary unbleached all-purpose works; do not substitute bread flour, which will tighten the crumb further.
- Stoned datesPitted dates. Half a pound is about 1½ cups once chopped. Toss the pieces with a spoonful of the measured flour before folding in, or they sink and clump. Deglet Noor hold their shape; Medjool are softer and sweeter and will melt into the crumb.
- Three teaspoons of cinnamonNot a misprint, though it is assertive by modern taste; reduce to two if you prefer.
- Powdered sugarIcing or confectioners' sugar. Sift it over the cake once it is completely cool, or it dissolves into a damp glaze.
- Yield and keepingTwelve to sixteen squares. Like most date cakes it improves on the second day; wrap it once cool and it holds for four or five days.
The Five Roses Cook Book was published by Lake of the Woods Milling Company and given away or sold cheaply to buyers of its flour, and it was among the most widely owned cookbooks in Canadian kitchens in the first half of the twentieth century. Its cake chapter reflects what a household could keep on hand: butter, brown sugar, soda, and dried fruit that travelled and stored well. Dates were often sold pressed into blocks or slabs and had to be stoned by hand. Cakes leavened with soda alone rather than baking powder were still common in this period, a habit carried over from the era of saleratus and sour milk.