Home › Cake Making and Baking › Eagle Cake
Eagle Cake
1 cup brown sugar ½ cup butter 1 egg 1 cup sour milk 1 cup raisins 2 cups Five Roses flour 1 teaspoon soda (dissolved in the milk) 1 teaspoon cinnamon ½ 1/2 teaspoon each cloves and nutmeg 1 pound figs
Like much of the Five Roses book, this is an ingredient list and nothing more; the method was assumed knowledge. What follows fills in the gaps and flags the two proportions that will surprise you.
- No method is givenAssume the standard creaming sequence of the period: cream butter and brown sugar, beat in the egg, add the sour milk with the dissolved soda alternately with the sifted flour and spices, then stir in the floured fruit last. Batter of this sort should be thick enough to drop heavily from the spoon.
- Sour milk and sodaSour milk here means naturally clabbered raw milk; pasteurised milk left out simply spoils. Use cultured buttermilk, or stir a tablespoon of lemon juice or white vinegar into a cup of whole milk and let it stand ten minutes. The teaspoon of soda is dissolved in it to react on contact, so get the batter into the pan promptly.
- A pound of figsThat is a very large quantity against two cups of flour, and it plus the raisins will outweigh the batter. Dried figs, stemmed and chopped small, are meant. Stewing them briefly to soften, or halving the amount, gives a cake that holds together in slices; the full pound gives something closer to a fruit loaf.
- Flouring the fruitToss the chopped figs and raisins in a spoonful of the measured flour before folding them in. Without it the fruit sinks straight to the bottom in a batter this loose.
- Five Roses flourA Canadian hard spring wheat flour, a shade stronger than most modern all-purpose. Ordinary all-purpose works; mix only until the flour disappears to avoid toughening.
- Oven and panThe recipe gives no oven instruction; bake in a moderate oven, in modern terms about 350F. In a greased and lined 9x5 inch loaf tin allow 55 to 70 minutes; in a 9 inch square pan, 40 to 45. It is done when a skewer comes out clean and the cake pulls slightly from the sides.
- SpicesGround cinnamon and cloves; nutmeg was sold both ground and whole for grating at home. Freshly grated nutmeg is stronger, so use a scant half teaspoon.
- Yield and keepingOne loaf, roughly ten to twelve slices. The heavy fruit and brown sugar make it better on the second day; wrap it well once cool.
The Five Roses Cook Book was issued by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company, whose head office was in Montreal and whose mills were at Keewatin, Ontario, as a premium for buyers of its flour, and became one of the most widely distributed cookbooks in Canadian kitchens in the years around the First World War. Its recipes are compressed to ingredient lists because the book assumed a cook who already knew how to cream butter and judge a moderate oven, and because space was given over to as many recipes as possible. The name Eagle Cake is not explained and has no documented origin; patriotic and emblematic cake names of this kind, like Washington Pie, were common shorthand rather than descriptions. What the recipe does record clearly is the household economy of the time: sour milk and soda in place of costlier baking powder, brown sugar rather than white, and a generous pound of dried figs serving as the bulk of a plain family cake.