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Prune Cake
1 cup sugar. 2/3 cup butter. 3 eggs (reserve whites of 2 for icing) 1 cup cooked prunes (chopped) 1 teaspoon (small) soda 4 tablespoons sour milk or hot water 1 teaspoon cinnamon 1 teaspoon nutmeg 1 teaspoon cloves 1½ cups Five Roses flour.
This is an ingredient list rather than a method, and it is missing at least two things a cake needs. Read the notes before you start creaming anything.
- No sugar, no fat, no baking timeAs printed the list gives no sweetener, no butter and no instructions; the method, and any sugar and fat, may simply have been omitted. For a batter built on 1½ cups flour and 3 eggs, roughly 1 cup sugar and ½ cup butter is a plausible scale. Treat the printed list as a flavour scheme to graft onto a cake formula you already trust.
- Sour milk and sodaSour milk here means naturally clabbered milk, mildly acidic; buttermilk is the direct substitute, and pasteurised milk left out will spoil rather than clabber. The acid is what activates the soda, so with the hot-water option you will get less lift — the cooked prunes supply some acid, but baking powder is the safer choice.
- "1 teaspoon (small) soda"The parenthetical appears to be telling you to under-fill. Take it as a scant ½ to ¾ teaspoon of baking soda. A full modern teaspoon against 1½ cups of flour risks a soapy, metallic aftertaste.
- The prunesCooked prunes means dried plums stewed until soft and stoned, then chopped — not prune butter or lekvar. Drain them well; a wet cup of fruit will sink and make a gummy band at the bottom of the pan. Check for stray pits.
- SpicingThree teaspoons of spice to 1½ cups of flour is assertive by current taste, and ground cloves and nutmeg of this period may well have been long off the mill. With fresh, potent spice, halving the cloves is reasonable.
- OvenNo temperature is given. A cake of this size wants a moderate oven, 350°F, for about 30 to 35 minutes in a single 8-inch layer or square pan, or 25 minutes for two thin layers.
- The reserved whitesThe two whites held back are for a white icing, as the list says. They are not part of the batter, so the cake itself is built on one whole egg plus two yolks — richer and denser than the egg count suggests.
- YieldOne modest single-layer cake, eight to ten small slices. Prune cakes keep well and improve on the second day once the fruit has moistened the crumb.
The Five Roses Cook Book was published by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company of Montreal and Winnipeg, and like most milling-company books it exists to sell flour: recipes were solicited from users of the flour, and the brand name appears in almost every ingredient list. Prunes turn up often in cake chapters of this period because they were cheap, shelf-stable, available year-round, and sweet enough to stretch a modest amount of sugar. The pairing with soda and sour milk points to a farmhouse rather than a bakery cake — sour milk was a by-product of keeping a cow, and using it up in baking was thrift as much as chemistry.