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Oatmeal Cake
½ cup butter 1½ cups brown sugar 2 cups oatmeal 1¼ cups Five Roses flour 1 teaspoon soda 1 teaspoon baking powder 1 cup boiling water.
Ice with boiled icing.
A short-form cake typical of the Five Roses book, which assumed its readers knew the creaming method and the standard oven. The list of ingredients is all you get, so a few decisions have to be made for you.
- Flour quantityThe printed page reads 1¼ cups flour, which is what our text now gives. Against 2 cups of oatmeal that makes a soft, moist batter, as intended.
- "Oatmeal" means rolled oatsIn Canadian and American baking of this era oatmeal on an ingredient list is rolled oats, not the fine Scottish pinhead meal and not cooked porridge. Old-fashioned large-flake oats give the texture the recipe intends.
- The boiling water is the hingeThe recipe gives no method, but the cup of boiling water is almost certainly meant to be poured over the oats and left to stand until the mixture cools and thickens before it goes into the batter. Oats added dry will draw moisture from the crumb as the cake bakes.
- No eggs are listedNo eggs appear in the ingredient list. Some oatmeal cakes of the period include them and the line may have been dropped in setting; as written, without eggs, the cake will be dense and closer to a bar than a layer cake.
- Oven and panThe recipe specifies neither oven nor pan. For a modern kitchen, bake in a greased 9-inch square pan at 350F for 30 to 35 minutes, or two 8-inch rounds for about 25 minutes, until a tester comes out clean.
- Boiled icingBoiled icing is made by cooking a sugar syrup to the soft-ball stage, around 238-240F, and beating it into stiff egg whites until the mixture holds a peak. (It is closely related to, but not identical with, seven-minute frosting, which is beaten over hot water rather than made from a separately cooked syrup.) It sets to a matte shell and should be spread while still warm and workable.
- YieldOne 9-inch square cake, twelve to sixteen squares, or a small two-layer cake.
The Five Roses Cook Book was published by Lake of the Woods Milling Company as advertising for its flour, and the recipes came largely from Canadian housewives who sent them in — which explains the telegraphic style, since contributors wrote down what they thought was worth writing down and left the rest to common sense. Oatmeal was cheap, abundant and central to Canadian and Scottish-descended cooking, and using it in cake stretched the more expensive flour and sugar while adding moisture that kept the cake edible for several days. Cakes built on oats softened in boiling water are often grouped with a broader family of scalded-grain baking said to include oatmeal bread and porridge loaves; the technique gelatinizes the starch so the grain holds water in the finished crumb rather than stealing it.