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MY OLDER SISTER BAKED ME a loaf of our mother’s banana bread last year. She had never baked banana bread before, and if that wasn’t a sea-change moment, I don’t know what was. The fact that homemade banana bread was the most-baked recipe of 2020 says a lot about what we were craving when times got hard. And a year later - when times are still hard - what are we hungry for now? With all the distressing news, the sad reality of climate change, an on-going pandemic, racial upheaval, and political divides, it just didn’t feel right for me to be writing about clever back-to-school lunchbox suggestions when the most pressing thing on parents’ minds is the fear of sending their children back into the classrooms. What are we hungry for? Let’s be honest: From peanut butter cookies to Wacky Cake, America’s baking hasn’t been all sugar-filled and multi-layered.
My eyes were opened to hard times through peanut butter cookies - peanut butter was cheap and plentiful during the Depression. And black walnut fudge - made with nuts you foraged nearby your home. And Wacky Cake - it was a moist, delicious chocolate cake that, surprisingly, had no butter or eggs when times were tight in the 1930s. If an old recipe contained dates, raisins, or even corn syrup, it screamed make-do when sugar was scarce or unaffordable. What about oats? When wheat flour wasn’t on the store shelf, instead sent to the U.S. military to feed the troops, oats stretched cookies in the home kitchen and created thin, crispy lace-like cookies still popular today. And oats as well as homemade applesauce from home-grown apples made snack cakes moist. Without chocolate? You could still bake a chewy bar cookie and call it a “blondie.” Baking through hard times took creativity, but it thrived. Canned milk and the importance of the pantry
Have we forgotten how we felt at the beginning of the Covid pandemic when we didn’t want to shop in stores and opened our pantry to see what we already had in-house? Cooks in tough times relied on their pantries, too, especially if they lived in remote areas like the frontier of Oklahoma and further west, or on barrier islands along America’s coasts, places without electricity and refrigeration. Without a cow and fresh milk, they’d reach for canned evaporated or sweetened condensed milk. And today can you imagine a velvety German Chocolate Cake, creamy Key Lime Pie, or silken Smith Island Cake without them? When baking through hard times you had to plan ahead. How an eggless cake feels relevant today
Back when thrift dictated what you baked, something called the Tomato Soup Mystery Cake was first made with home-canned tomatoes and later with Campbell’s condensed tomato soup. It had no eggs. Just flour and spices, raisins, shortening, and a little sugar. Some recipes called for a loaf pan and others for steaming the cake right in the soup cans. Another cake based on soft, slowly cooked raisins, sugar (if you had it), and some sort of fat (lard or vegetable shortening), is as old as the Civil War. It’s an old frontier cake using a Dutch oven (Cowboy Cake). Needing no eggs, this cake was leavened with baking soda and later with baking powder. It was a cake claimed by the Depression as well as World Wars I and II and thus got the name “War Cake.” M.F.K. Fisher vividly remembered War Cake in her book, How to Cook a Wolf, published in 1942. Born in 1908, Fisher recalled that as a child she ate it washed down by milk. The raisin and spice cake was "a remnant of the last war, and although I remember liking it so much that I dreamed about it at night." But she confessed it is a cake you forget about once war is over. "War Cake says nothing to me now, but I know that it is an honest cake, and one loved by hungry children." I’ve baked this war cake in my modern kitchen. It uses what I’ve got in the house - I don’t need to run to the store. It isn’t so fussy that you can’t substitute currants or prunes or any dried fruit for the raisins. It generously feeds a family and celebrates everyone being together. And it doesn’t need eggs, which means today even my vegan friends can enjoy it. This honest cake has survived harder times before us, so possibly it is what we need to soothe us now. What are you hungry for?Coming Thursday for Subscribers:
That family Banana Bread recipe. I make it with oil, and my mother baked it with butter. It’s a foolproof recipe to turn into loaves or muffins. Not yet a subscriber? Join me and become a part of my new Substack community, experience no-ad food journalism, honest dialogue, and fabulous, time-tested recipes. You will receive twice weekly my take on how to bake and cook well in this modern world. THE RECIPE: Cowboy Cake, War Cake, Depression CakeWhen America expanded west of the Mississippi River with the 1803 Louisiana Purchase, "make-do" cakes that could be baked on the move suited challenging times. One such cake was this Cowboy Cake, similar to a boiled raisin cake baked during the Civil War and World War I. It was made by simmering raisins in water, adding shortening, baking soda, sugar, spices, and flour and baking the batter in a Dutch oven. The big plus was that pioneers traveling west or prospectors hoping to strike it rich in the 1849 Gold Rush didn't need to add eggs, butter, or milk to this cake. This crowd-pleasing recipe comes from Luann Sewell Waters, of Wynnewood, OK, who teaches Dutch oven cooking and has researched the old recipes of the West. She says few chickens survived the west-bound trip, and eggs were hardier than the chickens. So pioneers invented ways to preserve eggs, such as dipping the eggs in paraffin, storing them in a brine, or sealing them with a borax and water solution that stuck to the shell. Makes: 8 to 10 servings Prep: 40 to 45 minutes Bake: 25 to 30 minutes 1 cup raisins, dried peaches or apricots, or prunes 3 cups water 1 tablespoon vegetable shortening 1 teaspoon baking soda 1 cup granulated sugar 1 teaspoon ground cinnamon 1/2 teaspoon ground nutmeg Pinch of salt 2 cups all-purpose flour Topping: Reserved raisin cooking water 1 cup granulated sugar 1 tablespoon vegetable shortening 1. Place the raisins and water in a 10-inch Dutch oven over medium-high heat. Let the water come to a simmer, then reduce the heat and let the raisins simmer uncovered until they turn a caramel-brown color and soften, 15 to 20 minutes. Drain the raisins and set aside, and reserve all the juice. Measure out 1 cup of the reserved juice and place this in the Dutch oven. 2. Place a rack in the center of the oven, and preheat the oven to 350 degrees F. To the 1 cup warm juice, add the shortening and stir to melt. Let this cool. Stir in the soda, sugar, cinnamon, nutmeg, salt, and flour until smooth. Stir in the reserved raisins. Set this aside. 3. For the topping, place the remaining juice in a medium pan with sugar and shortening over medium-high heat. Bring to a boil, stirring, until the mixture thickens and is syrupy, about 10 to 15 minutes. If you have a candy thermometer bring it 220 degrees. Stir well and pour carefully onto the top of the cake batter. Cover the Dutch oven, and place the pan in the oven. 4. Bake the cake for 25 to 30 minutes, or until the cake springs back when lightly pressed in the center. Serve warm with ice cream.
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