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Raspberry Cake
1 cup white sugar ½ cup butter 2 eggs 2 tablespoons buttermilk 1½ cups Five Roses flour 1 teaspoon cinnamon 1 teaspoon soda Nutmeg 1 cup raspberries (to be added last).
Bake in layers.
A stiff, spiced butter cake baked as thin layers — closer to what we would now call a spice layer cake than a raspberry sponge. The original assumes you know the creaming method and can judge an oven by hand, so a few numbers help.
- Mixing order matters more than the list suggestsCream the butter and sugar, beat in the eggs, then add the buttermilk with the sifted flour, soda and spices. The raspberries go in last, folded through with a light hand — stirred in early they break down and the batter turns pink and slack.
- Oven and pansThe recipe gives neither temperature nor time; a moderate oven, around 350F, suits it. The quantity is small — enough for two 8-inch layer pans, but thin ones — and 20 to 25 minutes is a reasonable guide, with the layers springing back at the centre. Line the bases, as the fruit sticks.
- The soda is out of balance by modern reckoningA teaspoon of soda against only 2 tablespoons of buttermilk leaves far more alkali than the acid can neutralise, and the surplus tastes soapy and darkens the crumb. The raspberries contribute some acid of their own, but a half teaspoon of soda, or a teaspoon of baking powder in its place, gives a cleaner flavour.
- Five Roses flourA Canadian hard-wheat household flour, roughly today's all-purpose. Measure the 1½ cups by scooping and levelling, around 190 g, and sift it with the spices.
- Nutmeg unmeasuredThe original simply says "Nutmeg," leaving the cook to grate it to taste. A quarter teaspoon, freshly grated, sits well against the teaspoon of cinnamon.
- Raspberries, fresh or frozenFresh berries were the assumption. Frozen work if folded in still frozen and not thawed, otherwise the juice bleeds and the layers bake heavy and wet.
- Yield and finishingTwo thin layers serve eight to ten. The recipe gives no filling; whipped cream with crushed raspberries, or a plain butter icing, would suit it.
The Five Roses Cook Book was published by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company and distributed to buyers of its flour — a promotional cookbook of a kind common in North America from the 1890s onward, and a very widely owned book in Canadian kitchens in the early twentieth century. Much of its content was contributed by users of the flour across the country, which explains the telegraphic style here: an ingredient list, three words of instruction, and an assumption that the reader already knows how a layer cake goes together. Chemical leavening had been in general household use for only two or three generations, buttermilk was the everyday acid on farms, and recipes passed between cooks without anyone standardising the ratio. Baking "in layers" rather than as a loaf reflects the spread of matched tin layer pans and the fashion for filled, stacked cakes at tea.