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Eggless, Milkless, Butterless Cake
1 cup brown sugar 1 1/4 cups water 1 cup seeded raisins 2 ounces citron, cut fine 1/3 cup shortening 1 teaspoon nutmeg 1 teaspoon cinnamon 1/2 teaspoon salt 2 cups flour 5 teaspoons Royal Baking Powder Boil sugar, water, fruit, shortening, salt and spices together in saucepan 3 minutes; when cool, add flour and baking powder which have been sifted together; mix well. Bake in loaf pan in moderate oven about 45 minutes.
A boiled-fruit war cake: the sugar, fat, spices and raisins are simmered together and cooled before the dry ingredients go in. It keeps well and needs no eggs, milk or butter.
- Cool the syrup completelyThis is the hinge. If the boiled mixture is still warm when the flour and baking powder go in, the powder can start working in the bowl and the fat melts into the flour, which risks a greasy, flat loaf. Let it come down to room temperature -- allow an hour or so -- or cool it faster over an ice bath.
- Moderate oven350F (175C). At that heat a loaf of this size wants 45-55 minutes; test with a skewer at the centre, as the fruit keeps the crumb moist and it can look underdone on top.
- The baking powder is period-specificFive teaspoons reads as enormous today. Royal was a cream-of-tartar powder, single-acting and generally weaker by volume than modern double-acting types. With a current supermarket powder, 2 to 2 1/2 teaspoons for 2 cups of flour is closer to normal modern practice; the full five may give an off or metallic taste and a loaf that rises fast and sinks.
- ShorteningAt the time this meant lard or hydrogenated vegetable shortening. Either works, as does refined coconut oil; 1/3 cup is about 70 g. Butter defeats the point of the recipe but bakes perfectly well if you are not avoiding dairy.
- CitronCandied citron peel, sold in blocks at the holidays and increasingly hard to find. Candied orange or lemon peel substitutes directly, 2 oz being roughly 1/3 cup chopped.
- Pan and yieldA standard 9x5-inch loaf pan, greased and floured or lined. One loaf, 10 to 12 slices. It slices more cleanly the day after baking and keeps well wrapped for a week.
- SpicingA full teaspoon each of nutmeg and cinnamon is assertive by modern palates used to milder ground spice, but the spices here are doing the work that eggs and butter would otherwise do. Freshly grated nutmeg is worth the trouble.
This is a war cake, one of the most widely circulated American recipe types of 1917-18, when the U.S. Food Administration asked households to conserve wheat, meat, fats and sugar for the armies and for Europe. The boiled-raisin method solved several problems at once: simmering the fruit with sugar and a little fat produced enough moisture and sweetness to carry a cake with no eggs to bind it and no butter to enrich it, and chemical leavening did the rest. Royal Baking Powder, whose promotional cookbooks are the likely source of this recipe, had an obvious commercial interest in the eggless-milkless-butterless genre, since every one of those cakes leaned harder on baking powder; the company published whole sections of them and kept them in print well after the Armistice. Recipes of essentially this shape survived into the Depression and again into Second World War rationing, often under the names "boiled raisin cake" or simply "poor man's cake."