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Wheat Shorts Cake
1½ cups wheat shorts 1 cup Five Roses flour ½ cup sugar Pinch of salt 2 teaspoons (small) soda 4 teaspoons (small) cream of tartar 1 cup milk ½ cup water.
Mix together quickly and bake in hot oven.
A miller's economy cake from the era when leavening was still mixed at the bench rather than bought in a tin. Two things need attention before you start: the main ingredient no longer sits on grocery shelves, and the butter is stranded at the end of the ingredient list with no instruction attached to it.
- Wheat shortsShorts are a milling by-product — the fine bran, germ and a little residual flour left after the white flour is drawn off. They are sold today mainly as animal feed. For baking, use coarse whole wheat flour, or approximate with about 1 cup whole wheat flour plus ½ cup wheat bran.
- The butterIt is listed last with no direction attached to it. Rub or cream the ½ cup butter into the dry ingredients before adding the liquid, or melt it and add it with the milk. Either works; the first gives a shorter crumb.
- Soda and cream of tartarThis is homemade baking powder, in the standard 1:2 ratio of soda to cream of tartar by volume. At the usual equivalence (¼ teaspoon soda plus ½ teaspoon cream of tartar per teaspoon of baking powder), this comes to roughly 8 teaspoons of baking powder for 2½ cups of flour, which is heavy. Cutting to 1 teaspoon soda and 2 teaspoons cream of tartar avoids the soapy, faintly metallic aftertaste that overdosed tartrate leavening leaves.
- "Small" teaspoonsThe parenthesis most likely marks a scant or level spoonful rather than the heaped one a cook might otherwise take, though period usage is not consistent. Measure flat.
- Mix quicklyCream of tartar and soda react on contact with the milk and are largely spent within a few minutes. The batter goes into the pan and into the oven at once; there is no resting it while the oven comes up.
- Hot ovenIn period terms roughly 400-450F. Because the batter is bran-heavy and slack it benefits from a strong start, but check at 20 minutes — bran browns faster than white flour.
- Pan and yieldNo tin is specified. The batter, roughly 2½ cups dry to 1½ cups liquid, suits an 8-inch square pan or a small loaf tin, and gives 8 to 9 servings. Expect a coarse, plain, scone-like cake rather than anything fine-grained.
- ServingIt is best warm, split and buttered, and it stales quickly — bran cakes with no fruit or syrup to hold moisture are usually gone the day they are baked.
The Five Roses Cook Book was published by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company of Montreal and Winnipeg, and like all miller's cookbooks its purpose was to move flour — but a large mill also produced mountains of shorts, bran and middlings, and a recipe like this one can be read as making the case that the coarse fractions belonged in the kitchen rather than the feed trough. Shorts were cheap, and economy and "wholesomeness" were arguments that ran together: coarse wheat was promoted both as thrift and as a corrective to the very white flour the same company sold. The soda-and-cream-of-tartar leavening dates the recipe's habits more than its printing; commercial baking powder was widely available in Canada by then, and cookbooks kept printing the pair long after the tin had won.