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Spice Cake
½ cup hot water 1 teaspoon baking powder ½ teaspoon soda 1 teaspoon grated nutmeg 1 teaspoon cinnamon 1 teaspoon cloves 1 cup raisins ¼ pound chopped walnuts 3 cups Five Roses flour. 6 eggs
This entry is an ingredient list rather than a method, and as printed it is missing both the sugar and the fat that a cake of this size requires. Treat it as a template to be read against a standard creamed butter cake rather than as a set of instructions.
- The list is incompleteThree cups of flour and six eggs point to a large creamed cake, which would normally take roughly a cup of butter and two cups of sugar, plus molasses or brown sugar in many spice cakes of the period. Nothing in the surviving text tells you the amounts, so any figure is a reconstruction, not the book's.
- No method is givenThe transcription preserves only the ingredient list. A cake of this composition would normally be assembled by creaming fat and sugar, beating in eggs, sifting the flour with the spices and baking powder, dissolving the soda in the hot water, and adding dry and wet alternately; but the sequence is a reconstruction, not the book's.
- Both soda and baking powderThe half teaspoon of soda points to an acid ingredient, such as sour milk, molasses or brown sugar, that the list as transcribed does not include. With no acid present, soda can leave a soapy note and a darker crumb.
- Walnuts by weightA quarter pound of chopped walnuts is about a cup, or 115 g. Toss them and the raisins with a spoonful of the measured flour so they do not sink.
- Five Roses flourA Canadian hard spring wheat all-purpose flour, stronger than most American soft-wheat flours of the day. Ordinary modern all-purpose is the closest match; cake flour would be too weak for a fruited batter this heavy.
- SpicingA teaspoon each of nutmeg, cinnamon and cloves is assertive by current standards. Nutmeg is specified as grated, and grating it fresh is worth the trouble.
- Oven and panA batter of this size would fill a 10-inch tube pan or two loaf tins. The text gives no oven direction; something around 350°F and closer to an hour, tested with a skewer, is a reasonable modern reading.
The Five Roses Cook Book was published by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company, one of the great Canadian prairie-wheat millers, and it was distributed in very large numbers as advertising for the Five Roses brand; it is often said to have been the only cookbook in many Canadian kitchens of the 1910s and 1920s. Much of its content was solicited from customers who used the flour, which may help explain the terse, shorthand quality of entries like this one, though the missing sugar and fat here look more like a defect of transcription than a deliberate omission. Spice cake itself belongs to the long line of English-descended creamed butter cakes, its nutmeg, cinnamon and cloves once expensive imports, and its raisins and walnuts marking it as a keeping cake for the tea table rather than an everyday one.