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Aunt Mary's Raise Cake
1 pt. bowl of bread dough 1 cup shortening 1 egg 2 tsp. Royal bak. pow. 1/2 tsp. Slade's nutmeg 1 cup seeded raisins Mix all together with hands until it will drop off a spoon or until all of the dough is softened up. Bake in a round pan in rather slow oven for one hour. Eat when two days old.
— Mrs. Elizabeth Hinsley
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A leftover-bread-dough cake of the kind that made sense when a household set sponge every week. The instructions assume you already have risen dough on hand and know what a slow oven feels like.
- The missing sugarAs printed there is no sugar at all, which would give a bland, bready loaf rather than a cake. Comparable raised cakes are usually sweetened, and omissions of this kind are common in community cookbooks, so the list may well be incomplete; sweeten to taste.
- A pint bowl of bread doughThat is a bowl holding about two cups, filled with risen white bread dough — roughly 10 to 12 ounces by weight. Use dough that has had at least one rise; unrisen dough gives a dense result.
- ShorteningIn household usage of this period this meant lard or a packaged vegetable-oil compound, depending on the date of the book. Butter works and tastes better, but a full cup to a pint of dough is a very rich mix — soften it thoroughly or it will stay in lumps.
- Brand namesRoyal baking powder was a cream-of-tartar powder; any modern baking powder substitutes measure for measure. Slade's (the D. & L. Slade Company) was a Boston spice house — read it as plain ground nutmeg, freshly grated if possible.
- Rather slow oven300 to 325F. At that temperature a full hour is right for a deep round pan; the cake is dense and needs the low heat to cook through without setting the crust too early.
- Mixing by handThis is the hinge. The dough, fat and egg have to be worked together until the mass is uniform and slack enough to drop from a spoon — a stand mixer with the paddle does it, but streaks of unincorporated dough will bake into tough seams.
- Pan and yieldThe recipe says only a round pan; a greased 9-inch cake pan suits the quantity. A smaller, deeper pan will take somewhat longer than the stated hour.
- Eat when two days oldNot superstition. Yeasted cakes are gummy and yeasty the day they are baked; two days wrapped at room temperature lets the crumb set and the nutmeg and raisin flavour come forward.
Raised or "raise" cakes belong to the era when bread was made at home on a schedule and a fist of dough was always spare — the yeast in the dough does most of the leavening, with a little baking powder for insurance. Recipes of this shape appear across American and British household books through the nineteenth century, and the type is generally traced back to the older enriched yeast breads and "election cakes" of New England, which were simply bread dough beaten up with butter, sugar, spice and fruit. The two brand names date the page as much as anything: Royal baking powder and the D. & L. Slade Company's packaged spices were both fixtures of the American grocery by the turn of the century. Philathea cook books were fundraisers compiled by the Philathea classes, the young women's Bible-study organisation, and their contents are exactly what one would expect — signed family recipes set down in shorthand for readers presumed to bake every week.