And I’ll give the how-to as well as the measurements to enable people who have NEVER made a cake from scratch to do this one:
Grandma Van’s Spice Cake
You will need a medium to small sheet-cake pan. And an oven. A mixing bowl. A spatula is nice. And a 2 cup measure.
1/2 cup Crisco from can. A shortening. To measure anything sticky, fill a 2 cup measuring cup with 1 and 1/2 cup of cold water: add the Crisco, and when the water reaches the 2 cup mark, you have 1/2 cup of Crisco. If you don’t have a 2-cup measure, hey, be creative: measure it 1/4 cup at a time in 3/4 cups of water!
AND tablespoon or teaspoon always means a LEVEL tablespoon measure, etc, unless otherwise stated!
mix in:
1 whole egg.
1 cup of sugar
1 and 1/3 cup ordinary flour
1 cup of applesauce (in the old days, this would have been homemade applesauce, or scraped fresh apple)
1 cup of raisins
1 cup of chopped pecans
stir all this together. Hand stirring is quite enough. Having a spatula is a good thing, but not necessary.
add one level teaspoon measure of cinnamon.
same of clove powder
same of baking soda
Stir it all up.
Wipe the whole cake pan interior down with oil or Crisco. And here’s a trick: DUST it all very lightly with flour: putting it in a paper grocery bag and shaking it will do it. This assures your cake will not stick.
Pour batter into pan and put pan dead center in a 350 oven: set the timer for 25 minutes.
Another trick: do NOT jar the stove OR open the oven door to check on it: this can stop the cake rising or even make it collapse.
And next trick: when the timer goes off, stick a dry toothpick into the center of the cake and pull it out: if it comes out without batter stuck to it, the cake is truly done. If there is batter on the toothpick, give it another 3 minutes. I mention this because if you have an iffy oven and no oven thermometer, you can have a problem. If you’re confident of your oven, skip this. This trick was developed back in the days of wood-fired ovens with no thermostat.
Set the cake in a cool place to cool off. You can serve this from the pan, or you can turn it out onto a plate. We always serve from the pan, so I hope you don’t need that pan again for another dish!
It’s important for the cake to cool before icing, because if you try to ice a really warm cake, the cake will tear under the pressure of the knife!
NOW START MAKING THE ICING:
put 2 cups of brown sugar (white will not do)—into a small saucepan
add: 6 tablespoons of milk.
4 teaspoons of butter (real butter is best flavor)
Boil this until the sugar is all melted.
Pour this hot mixture into: 1 cup of white powdered sugar, in a bowl. Be sure it’s Powdered Sugar, not just regular sugar.
Beat the heck out of it as if you were scrambling eggs.
Start pouring it out in various places on the cake, (a wiggly line works) and quickly use a knife to spread it out like butter on bread.
Again you’ll use your spatula to get the last of this out.
You can cut and serve it whenever you like.
that looks really good. will give it a try. need to find or make some clove powder…
Ground clove is commercially available. 😉
For anyone in the UK:
Crisco = Trex. (I’ve also seen lard and suet suggested, but Trex seems most likely, even though it doesn’t come in cans).
350 oven = 180/Mark 4.
Ordinary flour (probably) = plain flour (as opposed to self-raising) since the recipe includes baking soda (bicarb of soda) as well.
You’re on your own with cups, unless you have some cup measures (which I have).
Applesauce or scraped apple — any ideas, anyone? I’m thinking grated apple…
Powdered sugar — probably icing sugar.
I’m assuming lining with greaseproof paper is as good as flouring the cake-tin.
Maybe I should post the recipe for Mum’s Moist Cake…
OK. 1 cup (US) is 8.3 oz (UK). Best use cup measures, I think….
And Mum’s Moist Cake and Mum’s Cocounet Cakes are at http://arkessian.dreamwidth.org/31429.html
Oh, those look good!
Powdered sugar is the sort of stuff that if you try to eat a donut coated in it, you will inhale it and start coughing!
I’ll bet great-gran used lard (she lived on a frontier homestead), so any substitute shortening should work.
The flour, definitely not self-rising, not bread flour, either. Just the cheapest plain white flour.
applesauce is puree of fresh, peeled, cored apple. It’s often served as baby food.
Any sort of regular cake pan liner will work just fine!
I’m surprised at ‘cup’ being an American measure. But it does have that ounces equivalent. We have an equal problem in the states with weight-measures for cooking: I finally got a good kitchen scale (Amazon) but it’s not something you commonly see.
And knowing how this probably worked, back in frontier days, since gran used “fistful” or “double fistful” as a measure, I’ll bet great-gran used something very similar and the next gen (my mum) measured it after asking gran to throw some handfuls into a measuring cup!
Understand that, back in the day, this was definitely holiday cake! Sugar was not easy come by, and raisins and spices were precious, so out on the windswept hills of endless pasture, getting these items required a horsedrawn trip to the county seat and the laying out of serious cash, and baking required firing up the woodfired range, and some items couldn’t be had in the summer because most refrigeration was the cold back porch in the wintertime. Many was the child or spouse reprimanded for letting a house door slam! “I have a cake in the oven!”
Powdered sugar almost certainly is our “icing” sugar, then. We also have “caster” sugar for baking; it’s ground more finely than “granulated” sugar.
When I first came across cups as measures for baking and cooking, I was surprised; everything is weighed here. Even before I had scales, I had my Mum’s trusty old Tala measure (like the one at http://www.amazon.co.uk/TALA-COOKS-MEASURE-0-5/dp/B000SA8996) which converts volume into weight for loads of different common baking ingredients. I don’t think Mum ever owned a set of scales in her life.
Powdered sugar also has a bit of cornstarch in it, to keep it from clumping, if that helps any.
And Crisco is a brand name of vegetable shortening. You can find it plain or butter-flavored, although if you wanted the latter, I would think that you would just use butter….
I’ll bet a caramelized broiled topping with coconut & chopped walnuts would be great with that too.
Yum, definitely copying this recipe.
BTW, tried Brussel Sprouts since you mentioned them in a recent post, and am hooked. Somewhat like mild cauliflour, and not cabbag-y like I expected. Got a whole branch for $5 and am steadily working my way through the bunch. Thanks!
Yep: they are SO a bargain when bought by the stem!
You can also do a tart butter cream on that spice cake. But to me that brown sugar icing is one of the most scrumptious things!
Oh wow, am I ever copying down that cake recipe.
Applesauce, surely there’s an equivalent in the UK and Germany. It’s indeed a purée of fresh apples, so you get very tiny flecks of apple with the juice. It’s used as baby food, or added to cakes, or served chilled or warmed on its own.
Crisco is commercial shortening, a fat source. (Specifically, vegetable fat; it’s been a while since I bought any.) The old frontier source would’ve been lard or (I guess) rendered fat. That is standard, in one form or another, in cooking.
Powdered sugar is extremely finely ground sugar, used for baking cakes or pastry or cookies. It is ground more finely than table sugar for your tea or coffee.
In the old days, a family on the frontier or on the farm or ranch might be lucky enough to have a cold spring, possibly with a “spring house” (a small shed). They would put a bucket or other watertight container down into the spring water to chill something. That happened in mountain country. I’m told folks out on the plains or warmer climates could use a creek or spring if it was cold enough, or likewise the water reservoir of a well or windmill used to power a well pump. (One side of my family had branches in Virginia and later in Kansas and elsewhere. The other side was originally in Texas and then Oklahoma.)
One friend now in her mid- to late 70’s grew up on a farm and still cooks by experience and memory and feel, not by recipes. (Her literacy level is not as good as it could be, probably due to growing up on a farm and working, and because she’s from the pre-civil-rights era: It’s hard to learn to read and write well, if one is denied equal opportunity.)
My grandmother, by contrast, is a stickler for going by recipes. But her mother, who could read and write well, cooked by feel, by eye, too, and so did my other grandmother. — My grandmother (mother’s side) and my dad grew up as farmers. If you needed supplies, you made your list and nearly everyone went into town (nearest town or else the county seat) and you brought back supplies for the month or so. Sugar, flour, oil, kerosene, beans, etc.; anything you didn’t grow or raise yourself or get from trading with neighbors or the local mill or store. What car? Horse (or donkey or mule) and wagon. (My grandmother even had a story of their covered wagon running afoul crossing a stream, and another story (I believe from her mom and dad) of the Oklahoma settlers (Sooners) who sometimes crossed the line Sooner than it was officially open for white settlers.
Nowadays, her memory is fading, but she still can tell you about holding the reins of the mule team when she plowed. The womenfolk, including young girls (I mean 6 to 12 to 18) and women did things like that. My grandmother and her sisters and my dad’s sisters all have stories of plowing, a yoke or team of mules or horses, or pulling, routinely, 100 pound sacks of cotton. Girls might be pretty and feminine, but they were not wimps, no matter how a family thought of “women’s work.” (Fortunately, apparently my dad’s parents and even my grandmother’s parents thought the men and the women both should help out on any chore, including raising their brothers and sisters or their children. There was no “women’s work,” even if there were differences in how boys and girls behaved or dressed.
Yes, I’ve heard of handfuls as an old-time measurement. 🙂
Heck, my dad surprised a few “frontier” or “colonial” tour guides at old “frontier village” type sites by knowing what all the implements were and how to use them. Simple reason: Farmers and ranchers still used them when he grew up in the 1930’s and 1940’s. But I’m a city-boy. I’d be lucky if I remember what most of those are or do, though I’d recognize an old tool, likely. (These were tools used throughout the 1700’s to mid-1900’s, generally cast iron, sometimes other metals, and later sometimes steel.) My dad also knew, to what extent I’m not sure of, about working mills (grain grinding or sawmills either one, or run by a paddle wheel in a stream).
I’m glad my family took the time to teach me stories like that and expose me to what that life was like.
Heh, I guess my digression there is an early holiday / Christmas present too. 🙂
Growing up, we kept our milk bottles cold in a wire basket in the stream at the bottom of the garden, and kept our butter cool in a crock pot (terracotta outer pot full of water, glazed inner pot to hold the butter. Evaporation kept it cold.) And this was in a UK city in the early sixties, before we could afford a fridge.
(I’d heard the term but wasn’t aware of the exact item.)
I also write about how cool it is to finally have explanation of what a crockpot really is, and how useful it will be for my WIP which currently features life on a farm before electricity for someone who is used to fridges and neighbourhood shops, but it seems that my computer ate all but the last sentence.
I think a crockpot mostly commonly refers to a slow cooker or similar; I just don’t know another name for what we used for butter!
I think it is called “a crock of butter” but it isn’t anything you plug into the wall. It’s a lidded, ceramic container that has an inner container which the butter is in. Between the outer bit and the inner bit you poor cool water which keeps the temperature of the butter at the ideal level without using modern refrigeration. Usually the butter is connected to the lid bit, but there are different configurations. Old tech. 🙂
Thank you sweetbo. It is a crock! I was beginning to think I’d misremembered.
I love old family recipes (even when I can’t/won’t eat them.) I think it’s the feel of continuity with the past that they give me.
F’instance, my mother used to go on about lefsa, a potato flatbread that her Norwegian grandmother used to make. She mourned the fact she never learned to make it herself. Some years after she died, I came across the recipe — and discovered that it was basically the family mashed potatoes recipe, with flour added. And my mother never knew!
I think my mother would have loved the Internet. Le sigh, for lost opportunities.
When I was young, mashed potatoes were common fare, and never allowed to go to waste. A much more favored dish were last night’s mashed potatoes, mixed with flour, made into patties, half an inch thick, about the size of your palm, dusted with flour, and delicately fried to a golden brown. “Waste not, want not,” Mum would say. And four things preserved well in the cellar from fall to spring: dry beans, dry peas, either blackeyed or green, potatoes and apples; and to a lesser extent, carrots and cabbages; and of course whatever you canned.
New potatoes were peeled, boiled, and if there were fresh green beans, those were added to the pot for the last bit, with a little bacon, and that was supper; but with no green beans, then they were fried until browned, smushed with one’s fork, buttered, and salted and peppered.
Oh, the things one used to eat before the docs told us fat was bad. In the leaner days that followed the Depression (and in Oklahoma, the dustbowl) fat was what kept you from chilling while mending fence in a 40 mph winter gale.
The great health problem with Southern cooking is that it lost its rhythm of the seasons, what the atevi would call ‘seasonal’, and it became for people sitting at desks. It became fried potatoes all the time, hamburgers for lunch, baked potatoes every night, not just in season, etc. We didn’t get fat on that cuisine as long as it followed the seasons. You couldn’t go to a supermarket and buy things out of season. There wasn’t meat at every meal…and when there was, steaks tended to be smaller, half an inch thick. Oranges, an import, came only at Christmas—I had one orange a year, not orange juice every morning. You got green beans and fried squash during summer; during winter, you had a lot of stew or beans and cornbread. Meatloaf happened in the season there was celery. Pecan pie happened for Thanksgiving, after pecan harvest. Pork chops happened at hog-killing time, and were passed around the neighborhood: down a particular valley, or in a particular set of neighbors, hog-killing was a sequential event, one household one week, another the next, etc, that would keep everybody in porkchops, pork roast, and sausage for a month, living ‘high on the hog’—you got down as low as hamhocks for winter beans. Christmas was the ham that had been curing since early fall. Fried chicken was a late summer thing. Continental and intercontinental food distribution is good for business, but terrible for the waistline.
My friend’s mom would add powdered sugar to old mashed potatoes, roll them out, spread peanut butter on that, and then roll it up again, chill, and slice off sections. I thought it was magical.
We didn’t really do mashed potatoes at home. Mom would occasionally make them out of a box and they’d be like craft paste and she’d swear them off for a month or two before trying it again. She learned to cook the 1950s style from her mom (pop open a can and call it a casserole) so fresh potatoes never really occurred to her I guess. She did make my baby food from scratch out of the garden so it probably averages out, but all of my cooking I learned on my own besides the old potroast. She did at least make sure we had a vegetable at every meal and frozen dinners were rare so it wasn’t a complete wash.
I grew up in Sydney and fresh fruit and vegetables were available all year long, particularly the basics like apples, oranges, bananas, etc. The quality varied depending on the season. The stone fruits (peaches, apricots, cherries, etc) were strictly seasonal but the others came down from the north or up from the south by train or ship. Growing up in the middle of the west coast of the US, sort of south of San Francisco but well north of Los Angeles, would have been similar I imagine.
It sounds like CJ was describing potato pancakes (mashed potatoes mixed with flour, form a patty, fry). There are also hoe-cakes or johnny cakes, which IIRC are a cornmeal dough made into small, thick pancakes. Both are old pioneer era American foods, common under various names throughout the US. — Why on Earth haven’t I fixed those lately? Good, tasty food.
A crock and crockery were, I thought, words inherited from England, for earthenware as opposed to, say “china” or porcelain.
Yes, a crockpot is something else, a slow-cooker.
Made Grandma Van’s Spice Cake this morning in preparation for a Christmas family get together in Phoenix where all living members of the family of the last three generations will be meeting. Recipe worked great for an 11″x7″ rectangular cake pan. I used cranberries steeped in pomegranate juice rather than raisins. I had some misgivings about the cake due to the relative lack of moisture. The batter was almost sticky enough to form a ball of dough similar to breadmaking. I still don’t know if I should have attempted to doctor the recipe to take into account our altitude (4800 ft) but it does smell and look luscious. I added chopped pecans to the icing and there was more than enough icing to completely cover the cake in the pan and probably enough to cover the sides if I had removed the cake from the pan.
I think one reason we tend to measure ingredients by volume rather than weight is the variability in the moisture of items such as raisins, and nuts. More moist, more weight, but less volume. When these “additions” are not a significant source of moisture, the volume of the ingredients is a “good enough” approximation and may create the right “esthetic” for the cake rather than the impressions of too much or too little of the “fancy stuff.” I’ll let you know next week how the family liked the cake.
Two favorite holiday recipes we fix every year, Thanksgiving and Christmas. The stuffing often gets used at Easter too.
http://www.shinyfiction.com/recipes/chapSideDish/GranStuffing.htm
My Grandmother’s and Great Grandmother’s moist and savory stuffing. The recipe dates back over 40 years. They must have gotten it from a newspaper source, because at one time, there was a clipping.
http://www.shinyfiction.com/recipes/chapDrinks/Wassail.htm
The Bank’s Wassail (use the first recipe). This recipe was used by Southwestern Bank in the 1950’s and 1960’s and both given away to customers and printed in the Houston Chronicle. I have a copy of both from my mom. You can use it with either the full amount or half of sugar.