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Economy Cake
Beat well. Bake 1/2 hour 1 teaspoon soda 1 teacup sugar 1 egg 1 tablespoon shortening 2 teaspoons baking powder Enough Five Roses flour to make it drop easy from the spoon Beat well. 1 cup milk Bake ½ hour
A one-egg thrift cake written in the shorthand of a cook who already knew what the batter should look like. Almost everything unstated — flour quantity, pan, oven heat — has to be supplied by judgment.
- The hinge: batter consistency"Enough flour to make it drop easy from the spoon" is the whole method. Add flour a few tablespoons at a time until the batter slides off a spoon in a soft lump rather than pouring — roughly 1¾ to 2 cups for these quantities. Overshoot and the cake turns dry and tough, since there is only one egg and a tablespoon of fat to carry it.
- TeacupA teacup in period cookbooks is generally smaller than a standard measuring cup, often reckoned at about 3/4 cup, though usage was not consistent and some books used 'cup' and 'teacup' interchangeably. The '1 cup milk' is written differently, which may indicate a full 8 ounces.
- Soda and baking powder togetherA teaspoon of soda alongside two of baking powder is a great deal of leavening and points to sour milk or buttermilk, which the terse original leaves out. With fresh sweet milk the soda has no acid to react with and leaves a soapy, faintly yellow crumb; buttermilk is the safer reading.
- ShorteningAt the time this meant lard, or a lard-and-butter mixture, or one of the then-new hydrogenated vegetable fats. Butter works and tastes better. One tablespoon is very little -- this is a plain cake closer to a hot-milk sponge than a butter cake.
- Oven heatNone is given. Half an hour suits a moderate oven, 350F, in a greased 8-inch square or round pan. Test with a skewer at 25 minutes.
- Mixing order'Beat well' appears mid-list rather than at the end. Cream the sugar and shortening with the egg, beat in the milk, then work in the flour sifted with the soda and baking powder, and bake at once before the soda spends itself.
- YieldOne 8-inch layer, eight modest squares. It is best the day it is baked and stales quickly given how little fat it contains.
The Five Roses Cook Book was published by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company of Montreal and Winnipeg and distributed in enormous numbers to Canadian households, largely as advertising for Five Roses flour — hence the brand name printed into the ingredient list itself. Much of the book was assembled from recipes submitted by women who used the flour, which explains the compressed, elliptical style here: a cook writing for other cooks, who assumed the reader knew what a cake batter looked like. "Economy" cakes of this kind — one egg, a spoonful of fat, sour milk from the crock — were a standing category in North American baking long before wartime rationing made them famous, and they turn up in household collections of the period under names like poor man's cake, one-egg cake or plain cake.