I attended a glitzy cookbook awards program last week, in Portland, during the annual conference of the International Association of Culinary Professionals. This group has been giving cookbook awards since 1986, and the awards this year were given to the books judged as the best of the year (for 2009) in 16 categories. Three finalists and ultimately one winner are chosen from the highest ranked books in each category. Finally after all of the awards are given, the award for Cookbook of the Year was announced. And the winner this year was titled, Rose’s Heavenly Cakes, by Rose Levy Bernabaum. You can learn more about this book by clicking on amazon.com. Be sure to scroll down to see Rose's video.
We will add Rose's award-winning cookbook to the Betty Crocker Kitchens cookbook library. The cookbooks in this library range from the new books like Rose's to antique books. I decided to page through some of the older ones and was amused with the preface of a 1877 edition of Buckeye Cookery. This book was dedicated to "the plucky housewives of 1876 who master their work instead of allowing it to master them." I say, good for for those plucky housewives!
The oldest cookbook in the library is a 1774 edition of The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy by H. Glasse that was published in Edinburgh. According to our librarian, Glasse was probably the best known English cookbook writer of the 18th century.
In her cake chapter, there is the following recipe:
Butter Cake
You must take a dish of butter, and beat it like cream with your hands, two pounds of fine sugar well beat, three pounds of flour well dried, and mix them in with the butter, twenty-four eggs, leave out half the whites, and then beat all together for an hour. Just as you are going to put it into the oven, put in a quarter of an ounce of mace, a nutmeg beat, a little fack (?) or brandy, and feeds (?) or currants, just as you please. (I don't know about you but I don't know the difference between a fack or feeds. And my goodness, wouldn't your arm get tired after beating the batter for an hour?)
We have a facsimile copy of the first cookbook published by an American in American: American Cookery, by Amelia Simmons, 1796.
I paged right to the cake recipes in this book and found the following recipe:
A Rich Cake
Rub 2 pound of butter into 5 pound of flour, and 8 eggs (not much beaten) 1 pint of emptins (?), 1 pint of wine, kneeded up stiff like biscuit, cover well and put by and let rise over night. To 2 and a half pound raisins, add 1 gill brandy, to soak over night, or if new half an hour in the morning, and them with 1 gill rose-water and 2 and half pound of loaf sugar, 1 ounce cinnamon, work well and bake as loaf cake. (Does anyone know how much a gill is?)
To answer my question in the title of this post--the answer is YES! I looked at several other antique books in our collection and found that many plain cake and rich cake recipes contained lots of spices, raisins and many had alcohol in them too—either brandy or wine. Most cakes were commonly baked in loaf pans. I wonder how we ever arrived at the layer cakes of today? That will take more research and time.
In the meantime, I plan to make a 21st century cake to bring over to my mother's on Mother's Day. She loves rhubard (and I have lots in my garden right now) and so I'll make either this Strawberry-Rhubard Angel Cake
or this Honey-Rhubarb Cake.
