Home › Cake Making and Baking › Red Part
Red Part
Cream together 1 cup red sugar and ½ 1/2 cup butter, then add 1/2 cup sweet milk, the beaten whites of 4 eggs and 2 cups of Five Roses flour in which mix½ teaspoon cream of tartar and½ teaspoon soda. No flavor.
Place in a baking pan, first the red, then the white, and last the blue mixture.
Bake in moderate oven.
This is one layer of a three-colour patriotic cake — the red batter, which goes into the pan first, with white and blue mixtures poured over it. Read as a standalone recipe it is a plain white butter cake tinted with coloured sugar.
- "Red sugar"Granulated sugar tinted with colouring, sold by grocers and druggists for decorating; it could also be tinted at home by working a few drops of colour through the sugar and drying it. Use 1 cup granulated sugar with gel or liquid food colouring worked in; the tint has no effect on structure.
- Sweet milkPlain fresh whole milk, named to distinguish it from the sour or buttermilk that older recipes call for. Do not substitute buttermilk here — the leavening is not balanced for it.
- The leavening is off by modern reckoningEqual parts cream of tartar and soda leaves unreacted soda, since sweet milk supplies no acid; the usual ratio is about two parts cream of tartar to one of soda. Somewhere between 1 and 2 teaspoons of baking powder in place of both is closer to what the cake wants, and avoids the faint soapy taste and over-browning that excess soda gives.
- "No flavor"Best read as an instruction rather than an omission: no vanilla, lemon or almond extract is added, so the three layers taste alike and only the colour distinguishes them. Vanilla in particular would darken the batter and dull the tint.
- Egg whitesFour beaten whites, added with the milk and before the flour in the order the recipe gives. Beat them stiff enough to hold a shape but not dry, or they will break up when the flour goes in.
- Moderate ovenConventionally taken as somewhere around 350–375°F; the book gives no temperature. Baking times are a matter of judgement: a loaf or tube pan of the assembled three-colour batter will take considerably longer than a single 9-inch layer of this batter alone.
- Assembling the layersPour red first, then white, then blue, spooning each gently over the back of a spoon so the colours sit in bands rather than blending. Handle lightly and bake promptly if the stripes are to hold.
- YieldThis portion alone would fill roughly one 9-inch layer or a small loaf; the recipe specifies only "a baking pan."
The Five Roses Cook Book was issued by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company of Montreal and Winnipeg, compiled from recipes sent in by Canadian housewives who baked with Five Roses flour, and its cake pages run to dozens of near-identical white and layer cakes distinguished chiefly by a trick of assembly. Red-white-and-blue cakes belong to a broad turn-of-the-century fashion for patriotic table pieces, built in the colours of the Union Jack in Canada and of the Stars and Stripes across the border, and generally served for a national holiday or a church social rather than as everyday baking. The tinting depended on the coloured sugars and bottled colours then sold by grocers and druggists — cochineal, made from insects, was the common red. The recipe's terseness, its reliance on the reader to know what "a moderate oven" and "sweet milk" meant, and its assumption that the red, white and blue parts appear together on the same page are all typical of a contributed-recipe collection written for cooks who already knew how to make a plain cake.