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Ribbon Cake
2 cups sugar 1 cup butter 4 eggs 1 cup milk 3½ cups Five Roses flour 1 teaspoon cream of tartar ½ teaspoon soda Flavor with lemon.
Bake of above mixture in 2 pans.
To the remainder, add 1 tablespoon molasses, 1 cup chopped raisins, 1/2 cup currants, a piece of citron chopped fine, ¼ teaspoon each of cinnamon, cloves and nutmeg. Bake in pan. Then put the sheets alternately with a little jelly between. Ice the top layer. a
A three-layer cake from a single batter: two plain layers and one darkened with molasses and fruit, stacked with jelly. The instructions assume you know when to divide the batter, which is the one thing the text never quite says.
- Divide before you flavourMix the full batter, then pour off roughly two-thirds into two pans. Everything after that — molasses, fruit, spices — goes into the remaining third only.
- Cream of tartar and sodaHalf a teaspoon of soda with one teaspoon of cream of tartar is a homemade single-acting baking powder. It begins working the moment the milk goes in, so get the pans filled and into the oven without delay. Substituting 2 teaspoons of modern double-acting baking powder gives a more forgiving batter.
- OvenThe recipe gives no temperature and no pan size. A moderate oven, around 350F, suits a batter of this kind; in 8- or 9-inch round pans the plain layers should take roughly 25-30 minutes, and the fruited layer may want a little longer, the molasses and dried fruit holding moisture. The text calls the baked layers "sheets", which may mean shallower pans than rounds.
- Five Roses flourA Canadian hard-wheat all-purpose flour. Ordinary all-purpose works directly; 3½ cups is a stiff ratio against 1 cup milk, so expect a firm, close-grained cake rather than a light one.
- "A piece of citron"Candied citron peel, sold in tubs near the glacé fruit at holiday time. Two to three ounces, minced fine, matches the scale of the other fruit. If you cannot find it, candied orange or lemon peel is the nearest thing.
- Flour the fruitToss the raisins and currants in a spoonful of the measured flour before folding them in, or they sink to the bottom of the dark layer.
- "Flavor with lemon"Meaning lemon extract, about a teaspoon, or the grated zest of one lemon. Add it to the whole batter before dividing — the spices in the dark third will carry it.
- AssemblingCool the layers completely. A firm red currant or raspberry jelly, warmed slightly and spread thin, sets up and holds the stack; jam with fruit in it makes the layers slide. The dark layer sits in the middle.
- YieldThree layers, serving 12-16. Fruited cakes of this kind generally keep well, three or four days under a cover.
Ribbon cake appears in North American cookbooks from the later nineteenth century, built on the idea that one batter, split and variously flavoured or coloured, gives a striped cross-section when cut. The dark stripe here is made with molasses and spice rather than chocolate, which puts it close to the fruit-and-spice cakes of the same books; other versions of the recipe used cochineal or chocolate for one layer. Its appearance in the *Five Roses Cook Book* is straightforwardly commercial: the book was published by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company, whose head office was in Montreal, and distributed to buyers of its flour, and its recipes routinely name Five Roses by brand. The collection was assembled largely from recipes contributed by users of the company's flour across Canada, which is why the instructions read as they do — brisk, elliptical, and addressed to someone already standing at the mixing bowl.