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Strawberry Cake
½ cup butter 1 cup (large) sugar 3 eggs (save white of 1 for icing) 1½ cups Five Roses flour 1 cup canned strawberries (equal quantity fruit and juice) 1 teaspoon soda.
Note-Raspberries or cherries may be used.
Cream butter and sugar. Add beaten eggs, then strawberry fruit and juice (cold). Sift soda with flour and add last.
Strawberry icing. 4 eggs
A plain butter cake leavened entirely by soda reacting with the acid of the canned fruit. The original gives no pan, no oven and no time, which was normal for a milling-company book aimed at cooks who already knew their stove.
- The hinge: soda and acidThere is no baking powder here. The single teaspoon of soda is neutralised by the acid in the canned berries and their juice, so the batter must go into the pan and into the oven promptly once the flour is in. Sift the soda with the flour as directed rather than dumping it in, or you will get brown bitter streaks.
- Canned strawberriesThis means home-canned or commercially canned whole berries packed in their own juice or light syrup, measured as one cup of fruit and juice together. Modern frozen berries thawed with their liquid are the closest match; fresh berries will not give you the free juice the recipe counts on as part of the measured cup.
- Cold fruitThe instruction to add the fruit cold is not decorative. Warm fruit will soften the creamed butter and break the emulsion.
- OvenThe original specifies none; a moderate oven of around 350F is a modern guess. In an 8-inch round or square pan expect roughly 30 to 40 minutes; the batter is wet for its flour, so test with a skewer rather than by time.
- FlourFive Roses was a hard-wheat Canadian all-purpose flour, close in strength to modern unbleached all-purpose. 1½ cups is about 190 g spooned and levelled, appreciably more if the cup is dipped.
- Sugar"1 cup (large)" most likely means a generous or heaped cup rather than a level one, so somewhat more than the roughly 200 g a level cup of granulated sugar weighs.
- The icing is incompleteThe page breaks off after "Strawberry icing. 4 eggs" with no method, and it is not clear from the fragment whether those four eggs belong to the icing or to the next recipe; the cake itself reserves only one white. Do not try to reconstruct it from the fragment; use any icing beaten with crushed strawberries, and keep the reserved white for it if you want the original's economy.
- YieldNo pan or yield is given; an 8-inch layer or small square cake is a reasonable guess. Raspberries or cherries substitute directly, as the note says, provided the fruit is packed in liquid.
The Five Roses Cook Book was published by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company to sell Five Roses flour, and it was distributed cheaply and turned up in a great many Canadian kitchens, where it functioned as a general household manual as much as a piece of promotion. A cake built on canned fruit belongs squarely to that world: home canning was the ordinary way a household kept summer strawberries into February, and a recipe that used both fruit and juice wasted nothing. The reliance on soda alone, with the fruit acid doing the work that cream of tartar or a commercial baking powder would otherwise do, is a technique inherited from nineteenth-century baking and still common in the 1910s. The interchangeability noted after the ingredient list -- raspberries or cherries -- tells you the recipe was understood as a formula for whatever was on the cellar shelf.