Seven-Ingredient Cake: or, This is not a pudding

Today's pudding is actually a cake.

Seven-Ingredient Cake 1 cup syrup* 2 eggs 4 tbsp butter or shortening ½ cup sour milk, buttermilk, or sour cream 1 tsp baking soda 2 cups flour 1 cup raisins Heat oven to 350°. Grease a 9" square cake pan. Place the first six ingredients into a mixing bowl. Beat until well-mixed with a whisk or electric mixer. Then stir in raisins. If desired, you can add spices like cinnamon, cloves, nutmeg, mace, etc. Pour into the pan and bake 20-30 minutes, or until the center springs back when lightly pressed with a fingertip, or a toothpick inserted in the center comes out clean. This is delicious as-is. Or, you can top it with fruit custard or vanilla sauce. *Not sure what syrup the recipe calls for. I used cane syrup since the store near me sells it. Source: "Ask Mrs. Wilson," Philadelphia Evening Public Ledger, March 4 1919, page 14

"Ask Mrs. Wilson," Philadelphia Evening Public Ledger, March 4 1919, page 14

Today on A Book of Cookrye, we are trying out Mrs. Wilson's seven-ingredient pudding! You may recall when we made her potato bread (which was so good that we have since given it away as appreciation gifts). On the day Mrs. Wilson ran that recipe in the newspaper, she gave a recipe for what she called a "seven-pudding" directly underneath it.

The only hard part of this recipe was figuring out what Mrs. Wilson meant by "sirup" in the ingredient list. At first I ruled out corn syrup as too new for this recipe, but Wikipedia tells me that 1) corn syrup goes back a lot further than I thought and 2) the Karo people spent obscene amounts of money advertising their product as a wartime sugar substitute. So the home cooks of 1919 would have at least heard of the stuff. 

But after our previous experiences baking with corn syrup, I had absolutely no desire to use it again. Instead I bought a jar of cane syrup, which was a bit pricier than I wanted. For those who've never heard of it, cane syrup is basically sugarcane juice that has been boiled a lot. (Basically, they make it the same way as maple syrup, but start with a different plant sap.) It tasted like milder molasses.

Having resolved the syrup-purchasing conundrum, the rest of the recipe seemed pretty easy: pile everything into a bowl and insert a whisk.

After just a minute or two of beating, we had what looked like a really good cake batter. Mrs. Wilson writes that "spices may be added if desired," and I decided to justify my recent purchase of a canister of mace by adding some to today's cake. The mace added a really nice, subtle flavor that almost made me feel like it was worth buying.

As we prepared to stir in the raisins and bake, I realized I had forgotten a certain crucial ingredient:

Our cake (or pudding, if we believe the recipe title) batter looked just a little better after getting all of the ingredients into it. Now that we had added the forgotten egg, it was ready to get beraisined and enter the baking pan.

We have encountered a fair number of recipes that don't quite match what the title calls them. The so-called banana dessert bars were a (very good) cake. The crocus carrot cake was a pie and also a disappointment. The butter finger dessert bars were actually a pecan pie with coconut in it. And today's recipe is called a "pudding" is in fact a cake.

I've noticed that every time we've made a boiled pudding, it came out like a bag of cake. So my totally unfounded (because I am too lazy to look it up) theory is that eventually people started putting their pudding mixture into baking pans instead of faffing about with a pudding bag and a massive pot. I think the name "pudding" persisted for a while because it was the same batter that the old-style boiled puddings were made of. (Or at least I think it's the same batter that boiled puddings were made of.)

Mrs. Wilson's seven-ingredient "pudding" tasted astonishingly like our unexpected favorite, the war cake. And unlike the war cake, you don't have to wait for the batter to cool off overnight. 

It is what you hope for when people say something is "old-fashioned." If you're making the recipe in its original amounts, I'd suggest baking it in a loaf pan and telling everyone it's a pound cake. It's a lot better than it should have been. So far, Mrs. Wilson has not put a dud of a recipe in our kitchen. This cake will be made again.