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King Edward Cake
½ cup butter 1 cup brown sugar 3 eggs well beaten 2 cups Five Roses flour ½ cup sour milk 1 teaspoon soda 1 teaspoon cinnamon 2 tablespoons molasses 1 cup raisins (boiled in hot water). all.
Mix as usual. Put raisins in last of
A plain spiced raisin cake of the sour-milk-and-soda school, written for cooks who needed no method beyond "mix as usual." The transcription is scrambled at the end; read it as "Mix as usual. Put raisins in last of all."
- Mix as usualThat means creaming: beat the butter and brown sugar until light, add the beaten eggs, then the molasses, then the flour and spice alternately with the sour milk, and fold the floured raisins in at the very end. Do not overwork once the flour is in.
- Sour milk and sodaThe soda is there to react with the acid in the sour milk and the molasses; sweet milk will leave the cake flat and faintly soapy. Use buttermilk, or stir 1½ teaspoons of lemon juice or vinegar into ½ cup of whole milk and let it stand ten minutes. Sift the soda with the flour rather than dumping it in wet, and get the batter into the oven promptly.
- Boiled raisinsPlumping the raisins in hot water keeps them from drawing moisture out of the crumb. Drain them well and pat dry, then toss with a spoonful of the measured flour before folding in, which helps keep them from sinking.
- FlourFive Roses was a Canadian hard-wheat household flour; plain all-purpose is the equivalent. Measure the 2 cups by spooning into the cup and levelling, roughly 250 g, since scooping straight from the bag can add a quarter more.
- OvenNo temperature is given; the recipe leaves it to the cook, as wood- and coal-fired ranges generally had no reliable gauge. 350°F is a reasonable modern reading. A cake this size wants 40 to 50 minutes; a skewer in the centre should come out with a few dry crumbs.
- Pan and yieldThe batter suits a single greased and floured 8- or 9-inch square pan, a 9-inch round, or a small loaf tin, and gives 12 to 16 modest squares. In a loaf it will need longer and should be tented with foil if the top darkens early.
- Sweetness and colourBrown sugar plus 2 tablespoons of molasses give a dark, softly spiced crumb closer to a light gingerbread than a modern layer cake. It keeps well wrapped for three or four days and improves on the second.
The Five Roses Cook Book was published by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company of Montreal and distributed in enormous numbers to Canadian households, its recipes gathered from customers and many of them built around the company's flour. King Edward VII reigned from 1901 to 1910, and cakes, hotels, streets and biscuits were named after him across the Empire during and after those years; a homely raisin-and-molasses cake carrying his name is a fair measure of how the honour was spread about. The method itself is older than the name: sour milk raised with saleratus or soda was the standard leavening in North American farm kitchens before baking powder became cheap and reliable, and it survived in books like this one because a household with a milk cow always had sour milk and rarely wasted it.