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Oatmeal Fruit Cake (Eggless)
1 cup brown sugar ½ cup butter 1 teaspoon allspice 1 cup sour milk 1½ teaspoons soda 1¾ cups Five Roses flour 1½ cups oatmeal 1 cup chopped raisins
The book gives quantities only, in the terse style of its cake chapter, and leaves the method to the cook. Everything below fills in what a 1915 kitchen took for granted.
- No method is printedTreat it as a standard creamed cake: beat the butter and brown sugar together, stir in the sour milk, then the flour, oatmeal, allspice and soda, and fold the raisins in last. With no eggs, the batter will be thick and slightly sandy rather than smooth.
- Sour milkThis generally meant milk left to sour naturally; modern pasteurised milk tends to spoil rather than clabber cleanly. Buttermilk is the usual substitute, cup for cup; failing that, a tablespoon of lemon juice or vinegar in a cup of whole milk, left ten minutes.
- Soda, and why so much1½ teaspoons of baking soda is a large dose because the soda is the only leavening and the acid in the sour milk is what activates it. If you substitute sweet milk the cake will taste soapy and stay flat.
- OatmealThe word could cover either rolled oats or a ground/pinhead meal in this period, and the recipe does not say which. Rolled oats are the safer choice for the intended texture; steel-cut will stay hard in a cake baked this short a time.
- Five Roses flourA hard-wheat Canadian all-purpose flour milled by the company that published the book. Ordinary all-purpose flour is the modern equivalent; bread flour will make the crumb tougher than intended.
- Pan and ovenThe batter fits a greased 8-inch square pan or a small loaf tin. The book gives no oven direction here; about 350F for roughly 40 to 50 minutes, until a skewer comes out clean.
- RaisinsChopping the raisins, as specified, matters in an eggless batter with little structure: whole fruit sinks. Tossing them in a spoonful of the measured flour helps further.
- Yield and keepingAbout 12 to 16 squares. Eggless cakes of this type stay moist for several days wrapped, and this one improves on the second day as the oats absorb moisture.
The Five Roses Cook Book was published by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company, and like most miller's cookbooks of the era it existed to sell flour. Eggless cakes appear throughout Canadian and American household books of the 1910s, partly because eggs were expensive enough that a thrifty cook kept them for dishes that could not do without, and partly from seasonal shortage. What holds this cake together instead is the reaction between soda and sour milk, plus the bulk and moisture of the oats, both cheap and both always on hand in a prairie kitchen. Oats in cake belong to a wider Scottish-Canadian habit of stretching wheat flour with oatmeal, one that also produced oatmeal cookies and porridge breads.