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Fig Cake (Eggless)
1 pound figs. 1 pound brown sugar ½ teaspoon salt 1½ teaspoons cream of tartar 1½ teaspoons soda 4 tablespoons melted butter Five Roses flour Boil separately for 2 hours figs and brown sugar with enough water to cover. When cool, add Disthe salt, cream of tartar and soda. solve both the cream of tartar and soda in milk. Add melted butter and enough Five Roses flour to make a soft dough.
The text as printed has suffered in transcription — the fig and milk quantities are missing and one sentence has collapsed into itself — so this needs reading as a working outline rather than a set of instructions to follow line by line.
- The garbled sentence"When cool, add Disthe salt, cream of tartar and soda. solve both..." is two sentences that have been shuffled: add the salt, then dissolve the cream of tartar and soda in milk and add that. The word "Dissolve" was split across the line.
- Missing quantitiesNo weight is given for the figs and no volume for the milk; the method mentions both but the ingredient list omits them. Neither figure is recoverable from the text, and any amount used is guesswork on the cook's part.
- Flour by feel"Enough flour to make a soft dough" leaves the amount to the cook, as period recipes often did because flours varied in absorbency. Note that the original says dough, not batter; with a pound of sugar and a fig pulp base the mixture is likely to be soft and heavy rather than kneadable, but the text gives no further guidance.
- The two-hour boilFigs simmered that long with sugar and water become a dark jam, which supplies the moisture, colour and sweetness of the cake. It should be fully cool before the soda goes in, or the leavening will begin working in the bowl.
- Cream of tartar and sodaTogether these are the components of baking powder, mixed in the bowl rather than bought ready-blended. The proportions here are equal, which is more soda than a commercial powder carries relative to its acid; excess soda can leave a soapy taste.
- No oven givenThe original omits baking entirely: no tin, no heat, no time. Any figures used are the modern cook's decision, not the book's.
- YieldA pound of sugar plus the fig pulp makes a large cake, though with the fig weight and milk missing the exact quantity cannot be worked out from the text.
The Five Roses Cook Book was published by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company of Montreal and given to buyers of its flour, which explains why "Five Roses flour" appears in the ingredient list as though it were a distinct commodity. Eggless cakes like this one were a fixture of household baking long before rationing made them famous: eggs were seasonal and expensive in winter, and a boiled fruit-and-sugar base with cream of tartar and soda for lift gave a moist, keeping cake without them. Dried figs reached Canadian kitchens by ship from the Mediterranean, sold pressed into blocks or strung in rings, and recipes of the period treat them much as they treat dates and raisins — something to be stewed down into sweetness.Wartime baking of 1914-18 would later push these formulas into the spotlight, but they were already well established in flour-company booklets by then.