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Butterless-Milkless-Eggless Cake
2 cupfuls brown sugar 1 teaspoonful powdered cloves 2/3 cupful Crisco ½ teaspoonful powdered mace 2 cupfuls water ½ teaspoonful grated nutmeg 2 cupfuls sultana raisins 2 teaspoonfuls baking soda 2 cupfuls seeded raisins 4 cupfuls flour 1 teaspoonful salt 1 teaspoonful baking powder 2 teaspoonfuls powdered cinnamon 1½ cupfuls chopped nut meats 3 tablespoonfuls warm water Put Crisco into saucepan, add sugar, water, raisins, salt, and spices, and boil three minutes. Cool, and when cold add flour, baking powder, soda dissolved in warm water and nut meats. Mix and turn into Criscoed and floured cake tin and bake in slow oven one and a half hours. Sufficient for one medium-sized cake.
A boiled raisin cake of the type that became known as war cake: no butter, no milk, no eggs, and a batter that begins on the stovetop. The original ingredient list was set in two columns and reads scrambled in plain text, so check quantities against the list below before you start.
- The list, untangled2 cups brown sugar, 2/3 cup Crisco, 2 cups water, 2 cups sultana raisins, 2 cups seeded raisins, 1 tsp salt, 2 tsp cinnamon, 1 tsp cloves, 1½ tsp mace, 1½ tsp nutmeg, 2 tsp baking soda dissolved in 3 tbsp warm water, 4 cups flour, 1 tsp baking powder, 1½ cups chopped nuts.
- The hinge: let the syrup go completely coldIf the boiled raisin mixture is even warm when the flour and soda go in, the soda gases off early and the fat starts melting the flour into a heavy paste. Cool it to room temperature — an hour or more, or spread it in a wide bowl to speed things up.
- Slow oven300–325F. At 1½ hours this is a long, gentle bake; a hotter oven will set the crust before the dense centre cooks. Tent with foil if the top darkens early.
- CriscoAny solid vegetable shortening works as a direct substitute. Butter would defeat the point of the recipe but is fine if you are not cooking to the original constraint.
- RaisinsSultanas are golden raisins. "Seeded" raisins are large raisins with the seeds removed — muscat raisins if you can find them, otherwise ordinary dark raisins. Four cups of fruit total is not a misprint; this is closer to a fruitcake than a sponge.
- PanThe recipe says only 'one medium-sized cake', but the volume here is large: roughly a 9-inch tube pan, or two 8½ x 4½ inch loaf tins. A single 9-inch round is likely to overflow. Grease and flour thoroughly — the sugar and fruit make this batter a sticker.
- Doneness and keepingA skewer should come out clean of batter, though it will pick up melted fruit. Cool completely in the pan; the crumb is fragile warm and firms up considerably. Wrapped, it improves over two or three days and keeps a week or more.
A boiled raisin cake of the type later widely known as war cake: sugar, fat, water and dried fruit boiled together will carry a cake with no butter, milk or eggs to bind or enrich it, and the boiled fruit supplies both moisture and sweetness. The Story of Crisco appeared in 1913, before American food conservation campaigns of the First World War, and the recipe reads as a demonstration piece — an argument that the new hydrogenated vegetable shortening could stand in for dairy fat in a cake and, unlike butter, keep on the shelf without refrigeration. Versions of the same formula circulated widely a few years later under conservation-campaign titles, and similar cakes persisted as depression cake and poor man's cake. The heavy spicing — cloves, mace, nutmeg and cinnamon — helps compensate for the flavour that butter and eggs would otherwise have supplied.