Eggless, Milkless, Butterless Cake (1918)

A teacher's book from a demonstration kitchen

Liberty Recipes was published in Cincinnati in 1918. A photograph at the front explains that Doddridge, a home economics teacher, tried out most of its recipes in a Food Administration demonstration kitchen in Wilmington, Delaware. The cake appears in her chapter "Patriotic Cakes and Cookies," which opens by warning that rich cakes worked against the conservation program and that wartime bakers should keep to the simplest recipes, replacing wheat flour, animal fat and sugar wherever they could. Among her suggestions are raisins baked inside the cake and no frosting at all, and this recipe takes both.

Sugar was a household matter too. In the summer of 1918 the Food Administration asked families to keep to about two pounds of sugar per person each month, a voluntary allotment that store posters repeated to shoppers, and this cake still spends a full cup of brown sugar from it.

Flour, measured her way

The recipe asks for "2 c. flour" and never names the grain, although the other cakes on the same page ask for wheat, barley or potato flour by name. Without a stated substitute, this version uses all-purpose wheat flour. How to measure it is spelled out: a note at the front of the book says every measurement is level, and that unless a recipe says otherwise, flour is sifted once and then spooned into the cup until it is level full. The ingredient list follows her method.

The fat with no name

The ingredient list says only "1/3 c. fat," which leaves the choice to the cook, although the rest of the book points the way. Her chapter tells bakers to substitute vegetable fats or fat compounds for animal fat, and an earlier photograph, labeled "Lard & Butter Substitutes," shows tins of Wesson Oil and Mazola beside cartons of oleomargarine. Because the fat here is melted rather than creamed, a solid shortening and a liquid oil can both do the job, so this version offers either. Butter would undo the title, and some margarines contain milk ingredients.

A pattern older than the war

The Story of Crisco, Marion Harris Neil's cookbook for Procter & Gamble with copyright dates of 1913 and 1914, includes a Butterless-Milkless-Eggless Cake with the same boiled-fruit approach, larger and richer than Doddridge's, with cloves, mace and chopped nuts. Doddridge's version is plainer, and she doesn't say where it came from.

Other 1918 books took the idea elsewhere. The Twentieth Century Club of Pittsburgh printed a "War Cake" with raisins, currants, half a cup of lard and walnuts. C. Houston and Alberta Goudiss, whose book also gave us cornmeal ragged robins, went further: their cake can leave out white wheat flour and sugar, using corn syrup with cornmeal and rye flour, or whole wheat flour. Our look at wheatless and meatless cooking in 1918 follows the same rules into savory dishes such as the Pittsburgh club's mock sausage.

The title is useful when choosing a recipe, but it doesn't tell you everything the cake contains. This version still uses wheat flour and brown sugar, as well as raisins and vegetable fat. “War cake” identifies a family of economical cakes here; the 1918 date and Doddridge attribution identify the particular recipe behind this loaf.

Giving the slow-oven instruction a modern setting

Doddridge's whole baking instruction is "Bake slowly 1 hour in a loaf pan," with no temperature and no pan size. Cookbooks of the next decade or so placed a slow oven at roughly 250 to 300°F. This version bakes at 325°F in a 9x5-inch pan, which sits nearer what those books called a moderate oven, so that a dense raisin loaf can set through in about the hour she allowed. The leavening stays exactly as printed: half a teaspoon of baking powder and a full teaspoon of baking soda.