Home › Cake Making and Baking › Date Oat Cake
Date Oat Cake
1 cup rolled oats 2½ cups Five Roses flour 1 cup brown sugar ½ cup butter ½ cup lard ½ cup sour milk ½ teaspoon soda (dissolved in milk) Roll paste quite thin and spread date filling between 2 layers. Cook together and let cool.
This is the ancestor of the Canadian date square, and the original assumes you already know the missing half: the date filling has no ingredients listed and no oven is mentioned. Both are easily supplied.
- The date fillingThe book gives none. A workable reconstruction: about 2 cups chopped pitted dates, 1/2 cup water, 1/4 cup brown sugar and a squeeze of lemon, simmered until it collapses into a spreadable paste. "Cook together and let cool" is ambiguous -- it may refer to cooking the filling, or to baking the assembled layers together. Either way, let the filling cool before spreading; warm filling soaks the bottom layer to mush.
- Oven and timeNo temperature is given. A moderate oven, 350F, for 30 to 40 minutes, until the top crumb is set and lightly browned at the edges. It firms considerably as it cools.
- Sour milk and sodaSour milk here means naturally soured raw milk, acidic enough to react with the soda. Buttermilk is the direct substitute; failing that, 1/2 cup whole milk with 1-1/2 teaspoons lemon juice or vinegar, stood ten minutes. Pasteurised milk left out simply spoils, it does not sour usefully.
- Five Roses flourA hard-wheat Canadian flour, stronger than most American all-purpose. Ordinary unbleached all-purpose works; bread flour will make the crust tougher than intended.
- The lardHalf butter, half lard gives a short, sandy crumb that all-butter does not quite match. Modern leaf lard or shortening substitutes one for one; if you use all butter, expect a denser, chewier bar.
- "Roll paste quite thin"The recipe does call for rolling, and the 1/2 cup of sour milk makes that possible, but the dough is stiff and short and may crumble. If it will not roll, press half of it firmly into the pan, spread the cooled filling, then crumble or press the remainder over the top; that is how the modern date square is usually assembled.
- Rolled oatsOld-fashioned large-flake oats, not quick or instant. Instant oats dissolve into the dough and cost you the texture that gives the cake its name.
- Pan and yieldAn 8x8 or 9x9 inch pan suits this quantity; a 9x13 gives thin bars. Roughly 16 to 24 squares. Cut only once fully cooled, or the filling drags.
The Five Roses Cook Book was issued by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company of Montreal and Winnipeg, and went out in enormous numbers to Canadian households that bought the flour -- a promotional book that turned up in a great many prairie and Maritime kitchens. A date-and-oat bar of exactly this construction is one of the most durable things in the Canadian baking repertoire, known in the West as matrimonial cake, a name generally traced to its regular appearance at weddings and showers rather than to any documented origin. Dates were among the few fruits that travelled well and kept, reaching inland general stores in pressed blocks long before fresh fruit did, which is why they turn up so persistently in the sweets of a cold country. The recipe's terseness -- no filling, no oven, no pan -- is typical of the book: it was written for cooks who needed the proportions and nothing else.