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Favorite Cake
1/2 cup milk. 1/2 cup butter. 1 cup pulverized sugar 1 cup butter 1 egg (whole) and whites of 2 more 2 cups (scant) Five Roses flour 1 teaspoon (large) baking powder 1 teaspoon vanilla 1 cup seeded raisins (well-floured) Bake in square tin. Frost with plain or chocolate icing. Cut in squares.
A stiff, buttery raisin cake of the pound-cake family, given with no oven setting and no liquid at all. Both need attention before you start.
- The missing liquidThere is no milk or water here, and with a full cup of butter to two scant cups of flour the batter will be thick enough to spread rather than pour. That is how these contributed recipes often ran, but a tablespoon or two of milk beaten in at the end makes it spreadable without loosening the crumb.
- Pulverized sugarIn this period the term meant sugar ground finer than granulated, roughly comparable to what is now sold as superfine or caster sugar, and not modern confectioners' sugar, which contains cornstarch. Granulated will work if you cream it long enough with the butter.
- Five Roses flourA Canadian hard-wheat white flour from the Lake of the Woods mill, stronger than typical US all-purpose and closer to Canadian all-purpose or a light bread flour. Measure the two cups scant, as instructed, by dipping and levelling rather than packing.
- OvenNo temperature is given. Treat it as a moderate oven, 350F, on a middle rack.
- The tin and the timeA square tin means roughly 8 by 8 inches, greased and floured or lined. Expect 35 to 45 minutes; the cake is done when a skewer in the centre comes out clean and the edges have begun to pull from the sides.
- Flouring the raisinsThe instruction is not decoration. Tossing the seeded raisins in a spoonful of the measured flour keeps them suspended in a batter this heavy instead of sinking to the base.
- Seeded raisins'seeded' here means the seeds have been removed. Raisins of the period often came with seeds in, and seeding was done either commercially or at home. Modern seedless raisins go straight in.
- EggsOne whole egg plus two whites gives a paler crumb than three whole eggs would. Keep the two yolks for another use, such as a custard.
- YieldAn 8-inch square cuts into about 16 squares. The recipe's order -- frost, then cut in squares -- indicates the cake is iced whole and then divided.
The Five Roses Cook Book was published by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company of Winnipeg and Montreal, and its recipes were largely gathered from Canadian housewives who used the company's flour -- which may help explain why so many entries carry vague titles like "Favorite Cake" and assume the reader already knows her own oven. Cakes of this type, heavy on butter and eggs with no chemical leavening beyond a spoonful of baking powder, sit between the older English pound cake and the lighter layer cakes that dominated North American baking by the 1920s. The cake is baked in a square tin, iced on top, and cut into squares rather than turned out as a round layered cake, and it is studded with raisins.