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Pepper Cake
1 cup raisins (stoned) 1 cup baking syrup 2 eggs ½ cup butter ½ cup sour cream ½ cup sugar 2 cups Five Roses flour 1 teaspoon soda 1 teaspoon cinnamon Nutmeg 1 teaspoon black pepper Bake about 40 minutes.
A plain spiced cake of the type Canadian mills printed by the hundred, given here with almost no method at all. The gaps are the oven temperature, the pan, and the mixing order, all of which the 1915 cook was expected to supply.
- Baking syrupThis is table molasses or a light cane syrup of the sort sold in tins for baking, not blackstrap. Fancy molasses, golden syrup, or a mild unsulphured molasses all stand in; blackstrap will make the cake bitter and heavy.
- Oven temperatureThe recipe gives none. 350F for the 40 minutes stated is a reasonable modern reading; molasses browns fast, so check at 35 minutes with a skewer.
- PanAlso unstated. This quantity fits an 8-inch square pan or a 9x5 loaf tin, greased and lined. A loaf will want closer to 50 minutes.
- Soda and sour creamThe teaspoon of soda is raised by both the sour cream and the acidic molasses, and there is no other leavening. Use real cultured sour cream rather than a thickened dairy blend, and get the batter into the oven promptly once the soda is wet.
- Stoned raisinsSimply pitted. Modern seedless raisins need no attention beyond a light toss in a spoonful of the measured flour to keep them from sinking.
- NutmegListed with no amount, leaving the quantity to the cook's judgement. A quarter teaspoon of freshly grated nutmeg suits this quantity.
- The pepperA full teaspoon of black pepper is not a misprint and is the point of the cake. Freshly ground gives heat and perfume; pre-ground tin pepper gives dust. It reads as warmth alongside the cinnamon rather than as savoury spice.
- Method and yieldCream the butter and sugar, beat in eggs and syrup, then add the dry ingredients alternately with the sour cream. Makes one cake of 9 to 12 slices; it keeps better on the second day, wrapped.
Pepper in sweet baking is older than the split between sweet and savoury spicing that most modern palates take for granted, and it survives in the Northern European gingerbread family — German Pfefferkuchen, Scandinavian pepperkaker, Dutch peperkoek — where the name often covers a whole cupboard of imported spices rather than pepper alone. Here, in a Canadian milling-company cookbook, it survives as an actual teaspoon of black pepper in a molasses-and-sour-cream cake. The Five Roses Cook Book was published by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company to sell flour, and its recipes were gathered from housekeepers across the country; the terseness of this entry, with no oven heat, no pan and no mixing order, is typical of a book written for women who had made a dozen cakes like it and needed only the proportions. The sour cream is a farm detail — the cream that had soured on its own was worth something in a batter that also carried soda.