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A Canada War Cake
(Butterless, Eggless, Milkless) 2 C brown sugar 2 C hot water 2. T lard 1/2 pkg. seedless raisins 1 t soda 1 t salt 1 t cinnamon 1 t cloves 3 C flour Boil all ingredients five minutes after they begin to bubble. When cold, add flour, and soda, dissolved in 1 t hot water. This cake is better at the end of a week or even longer.
A boiled-syrup cake from the era of wartime rationing, written for cooks who already knew what to do with a batter. The original never says to bake it, so the important details are missing rather than wrong.
- The missing instructionNo pan, temperature or time is given. A moderate oven, in the region of 350F, and baking until a skewer in the centre comes out clean is the usual treatment for this kind of boiled cake; expect roughly an hour. Note that the quantity is large and may fill more than one loaf pan.
- Boil only the syrup"Boil all ingredients" means everything in the list except the flour and soda, which are added afterwards. Combine sugar, water, lard, raisins, salt and spices, bring to a bubble, and hold it there five minutes.
- Let it go completely coldThe recipe is explicit: add the flour and soda only when the syrup is cold, so the soda is not spent before the cake reaches the oven.
- Half a package of raisinsPackage sizes varied; on a package of about a pound, half is roughly 7 to 8 ounces, or something like 1 1/2 cups. Any dark seedless raisin works.
- Soda measured twiceThe list gives 1 teaspoon soda and the method repeats it dissolved in hot water. It is one teaspoon of baking soda total, dissolved in a teaspoon of hot water and stirred in with the flour.
- LardTwo tablespoons is all the fat in the cake. Lard gives the closest result; shortening or butter both work, though butter reintroduces the dairy the recipe was designed to avoid.
- UnitsC is cup, T tablespoon, t teaspoon.
- KeepingThe claim about improving over a week is in the original. Wrap the cooled cake tightly; the sugar syrup keeps it moist.
Cakes like this appeared across Canada and the United States during the First World War, when butter, eggs and milk were scarce, expensive, or being conserved for shipment overseas. The formula is an old one dressed for the occasion: a boiled raisin syrup carrying its own moisture and sweetness, leavened with soda alone, of a type that also travelled under names like poor man's cake and boiled cider cake before 1914. The parenthetical subtitle does the advertising. Wartime economy recipes of this sort circulated long after the armistice, partly out of thrift and partly because the cake genuinely keeps.