Runza Casserole: Put it all in one pan and you're done

Today, we are making runza casserole!

Runza Casserole 2 pounds ground beef 2 onions, finely chopped (or one 12-oz package frozen chopped onions) 4 cups finely shredded cabbage Salt, pepper, and other seasonings to taste (I added garlic powder and a lot of paprika) 2 tubes refrigerated crescent rolls (or one large batch of biscuit dough) 1 pound mozzerella cheese, shredded (I used cheddar instead) Heat oven to 350°. Grease a 9x13 pan. Brown beef and onion in a large pot. Drain. Reduce heat to medium-low. Sprinkle the cabbage on top of the meat. Put the lid on the pot and let it cook without peeking for about eight minutes. Then stir in the salt and seasonings. While the cabbage is steaming, spread one tube of crescent roll pieces over bottom of the pan. Press to close seams. Put the meat and cabbage over the rolls. Sprinkle the cheese on top. Then unroll the second tube of crescent rolls and lay them on top. Bake for 35 to 40 minutes. Cover with foil for the last 10 minutes (this softens the top crust). Note: If you cut this in half, it fits nicely in an oven-safe skillet. Irene Biederstedt (McLaughlin, South Dakota); KFYR-5 TV 40th Anniversary Cookbook; Bismarck, North Dakota; 1993

I love the picture on the front cover. It looks like a snapshot from the Thanksgiving office potluck. Also, that light looks like a late-1980s spaceship.

KFYR-5 TV 40th Anniversary Cookbook; Bismarck, North Dakota; 1993

As I understand it, runzas are yeast rolls stuffed with meat and cabbage. They look like something that originally was a complete meal in an edible handheld package. Today, we're simplifying the process by putting everything into one big pan.

Speaking of simplifying things (or at least trying to), we are shredding today's cheese the modern way! I already planned to electrically shred the cabbage, so I thought I might try to do the same with the cheese. 

One pound of cheese may seem a lot for one casserole. But if you read the ingredients, we're using a lot of everything. If you make this recipe in full quantity, it will feed a whole family, any friends have wandered in, and anyone looking for leftovers the next day.

I have to admit, I like the electric cabbage shredder more than I thought it would. Fussing with all those food processor attachments seemed pointless the first time-- especially when I had to clean every one of them. But sometimes I just want to make dinner without any knife skills. And even though this adds a lot more dishes to the pileup in the sink, sometimes it's nice to get dinner ready faster. 

Back to the casserole, we didn't manage to shred the cheese on the first attempt. (A copy of the food processor instruction manual would have been nice.) Instead, I put all the accessory pieces together wrong and squished the cheese.

After some trial and error, we were soon shredding cheese at an astonishing rate. If I'd gotten this right the first time, it would have been twice as fast as using a normal grater. Instead, I think I delayed dinner by at least ten minutes.

Next, we got to why I had the food processor out: the cabbage. This seemed like one of those recipes where you want the cabbage in very fine slivers, which I can't do by hand (though I'm better than I was). Also I just wasn't in the mood for a lot of hand-slicing.

Are we using equal amounts of cabbage and cheese?

Now that we were done spending time trying to save time, it was time to get to the meat of the recipe. I forget where I read this (I think it was on Tumblr), but someone said "Half of all 'good family recipes' start with 'cream the butter and sugar,' and the other half start with 'brown the beef and onions.'" Naturally, we used frozen onions so I didn't have to chop them myself.

We are next directed to put the cabbage on top and let it steam for a bit. This strained our skillet's capacity, but we managed to get everything crammed in there and put foil on top. I really hoped the cabbage would shrink in the steam.

 

We are supposed to use canned crescent rolls for the top and bottom of this casserole. I used homemade biscuit dough because I forgot to get the cans.

Speaking of canned bread, I was going to write that if you halve the recipe, you can purchase two canned pizza crusts and fit it in a cast-iron skillet. Then I stopped by the canned biscuit section and checked the prices. Two cans of crescent rolls would have cost more than the beef! I'm not a snob (though I get how it can seem like that sometimes), but canned biscuits are absolutely not that good.   

Shopping aside, we were now ready to assemble. I accidentally made this a lot harder than it needed to be. Had I followed the directions, it would have been a simple matter of lining a 9x13 pan with bread dough and then tipping the skillet into it. Instead, we had to empty the pan long enough to put bread in the bottom first. So remember: even if a recipe is only ten sentences long, be sure to read the whole thing!

The recipe's final line of instruction confused me: "Cover with foil the last 10 minutes to soften the crust." I figured this would make sense when the time came. Ten minutes before the time was up, the top crust had hardened to a big cracker. Even though I didn't think anything could fix it, I put our runza casserole under a foil tent to finish out the baking time. The crust turned back into soft bread, which again proves that you should always read the recipe.

This was a lot better than I thought. It hit the same satisfying spot as the meatball-mushroom pie. It's hard to go wrong when your recipe starts with a pound of beef, a lot of onions, and bread on top. 

It's a really nice meal-in-one-pan for when you want meat, vegetables, and no fuss (assuming you don't find canned biscuits too expensive). When I was making this, I thought it might need more vegetables in it. But I think it had the perfect meat-to-cabbage ratio. It's simple, but satisfying. And if you remember to get canned biscuits and don't mind the expense, it's pretty fast to put together, too. 

It was a lot better when I halved the filling to match my half-size pan, though.  

 

Italian Honey Tarts: They contain no honey and may not be Italian

I have no idea what makes this "Italian."

Italian Tarts with Italian Honey        Pastry: 8 oz (2 cups) flour 1 tsp salt (if butter is unsalted) 5 oz (10 tbsp) butter 1 tsp sugar ⅛ tsp lemon extract (or juice of 1 lemon) 1 egg yolk 2 tbsp ice-cold water (have at least half a cup on hand)        Italian Honey: 3 eggs 4 oz (½ cup) sugar 1 pinch (⅛ tsp) cream of tartar 2 oz (4 tbsp) butter 1 tsp salt (if butter is unsalted) 1 to 3 tsp lemon extract (depending on your taste) Have a 12-cup muffin pan ready. (Or use tartlet pans if you have them.) You probably don't need to coat it with cooking spray, but I did so I could be very sure nothing would get stuck. Sift flour and salt (if using) into a large bowl. Rub in the butter. Beat together the sugar, lemon extract (or lemon juice), egg yolk, and 2 tablespoons of water. Work this into the flour mixture. Mix until it forms a stiff dough, adding more water if it's too crumbly. Place in a sealed container (a ziploc bag will do) and let rest for at least 30 minutes in the refrigerator. Divide the dough into two portions. Roll half of it out. Cut it into small circles, then line the muffin cups with them. When rerolling the dough scraps, stack them on each other rather than smushing them into a ball-- this keeps the dough from getting tough. When you run out of dough, repeat with the other half of it. (If you have a large space to work with, you can roll all the dough out instead of dividing it in two. But you will have a very large and perhaps unwieldy sheet of it.) Refrigerate the tart shells for at least 30 minutes. (If you wrap the pan well, you can leave them in the fridge overnight or for a couple of days if desired). When ready to bake, make the Italian Honey: In the top of a double boiler (or a mixing bowl that can handle sitting over a pot of boiling water), whisk the eggs, sugar, and cream of tartar until thoroughly mixed. Add the butter and place over simmering water (simmering, not boiling hard), stirring constantly until the butter is melted and the mixture is about as thick as cake batter. Remove from heat and allow to cool. Heat oven to 350° (gas mark 4, 180°C). Bake the pastry shells until they are slightly golden. Then spoon in the filling almost to the top of each tart shell, being careful none of it spills down the sides. If you want to be very sure your tarts won't stick, let the empty pastry shells cool until they won't fall apart when you handle them. (You don't need to wait for them to get all the way to room temperature.) Then lift each one out, put it into a paper cupcake liner, and return it to the muffin pan. Then add the filling. Bake until the tarts puff up and are firm when you shake the pan. "In the Kitchen," The Southern Districts Advocate; Katanning, Western Australia; 8 July 1935; page 3

I saw the recipe for "Italian Tarts" and it looked like an empty pie crust. Then I noticed the recipe below is "Italian Honey." Apparently the staff at The Southern Districts Advocate assumed that readers would know that the Italian honey goes in the Italian tarts.

The Southern Districts Advocate; Katanning, Western Australia; 8 July 1935

I would love to know what makes this "Italian honey." Is this derived from an Italian honey substitute? I looked up "Italian honey" to see if people still make anything resembling this recipe (in Australia or anywhere else). But I only found people selling honey from Italy. I didn't even see anyone describing it as an "old, forgotten dish" like bloater paste.

Whatever "Italian honey" is, it starts off with eggs and a lot of butter. I almost thought it was a custard, but it seems closer to our chess pie.

I was going to put this directly on the stove burner because I rarely bother with double boilers these days. But then I realized this would turn into scrambled eggs given the slightest mistake. So I perched our bowl over a pot of water (simmering, not boiling!) as the recipe says.

The recipe says to cook "till thick," but I didn't know what that meant. Should our Italian honey be runny enough to pour? Should it be firm enough to hold a shape? I cooked it until you could swipe a finger across a coated spoon and leave a line, which brings us about into cake batter territory. Our honey would have made a very nice sauce, but I didn't see how this could ever be used in tarts. It would spill as soon as you lifted one off the plate.

I was going to dye it purple, but I added a few tasteful drops of yellow instead.

Upon tasting, our Italian honey reminded me again of chess pie (which as we said, is very similar in ingredients). I did not regret setting up a double boiler.

I was going to use our Italian honey as a sort of custard sauce in the trifle we saw recently. But then I realized I would never forgive myself for half-finishing a recipe. We therefore would complete our Italian tarts.

Unfortunately, we didn't have enough butter for the pastry, so I had to substitute half shortening. I've seen a lot of people swear that shortening makes the best pie crusts, that it handles ever-so-well, and that it is by far superior to every other option (as long as you don't care how the pie crust tastes). But every time I've tried to use shortening, my crusts have come out crumbly and hard to work with. They always crack no matter how gently I "ease" them into place.

By contrast, I can drape a butter crust into place almost as easily as laying out a dishrag. And butter is supposed to be harder to work with. As a visual reminder:

This is all butter, no shortening.

Let's compare that to just about every shortening crust I've ever made:

Getting back to the recipe, I'm not sure what the egg yolk is supposed to do in the pastry. I looked it up online and only found a lot of AI slop. A few actual humans made vague claims that the pie will be "richer." 

These were very irksome to get into place because of the shortening. They kept wanting to crack and crumble. But on the bright side, we learned that our largest pastry cutter (viz. an extra-large peach can with both ends cut off) from when we made freestanding lemon tarts is the perfect size for making pie shells in a muffin pan. I used to have to make lots of little pastry balls and roll them out one by one.

I filled two tarts before I realized that I was only inviting failure. I had forgotten to pop the little shells out of the pan and into into paper liners. That meant that if even the tiniest drop of Italian honey dripped out of place, it would glue our tarts to the pan. And once tarts get stuck, you can only get them out in pieces.

I had no idea how long to bake our Italian tarts, so I took them out of the oven after they stopped wobbling when I shook the pan. I didn't know what to think when they puffed up, though. Had I made some unholy sugar-laden bastardization of that "cloud bread" that made the rounds when keto was the big diet trend? (In case you missed it, "cloud bread" was basically an aerated version of those weird scrambled-egg sheets they use on Egg McMuffins.)

Our tarts deflated back into normal as they cooled. Nevertheless, I wasn't reassured until I cut one open and found that we did not have tart-sized pucks of scrambled egg.Instead, we had dessert.

The special Italian pie crust tasted very ordinary. If you're making your own pie dough, a few drops of lemon extract won't go amiss. But if you want to simply buy frozen tart shells, you won't miss it.

These have the same texture as Harris Teeter's lemon squares without the heavy payload of sugar. They're perfect for when you want something sweet but not too sweet. I'm still not sure why they're called Italian honey, but I did like them enough to make them again.

Orange Pound Cake: or, Unexpectedly doing it the very old way

Today, we're letting Australia show us how to make a cake!

Orange Cake Weigh on a kitchen scale: 3 eggs Then take the same weight of: Butter Sugar Flour You will also need: Juice of 1 orange (Grate the rind off the orange if desired-- it does add a nice flavor.) 1 tsp salt (if butter is unsalted) Heat oven to 350°. Grease an 8-inch round cake pan. If you want extra insurance, cut a circle of parchment paper to fit the bottom of the pan before spraying it. Then, after spraying the pan, press the paper into place. This cake would be even better in mini-loaf pans if you have three or four of them. Beat the butter and sugar (and salt if using) until very light and fluffy. Then beat the eggs on high speed until they are whipped to a creamy-colored foam. You can use the same beaters for the butter and then the eggs-- you don't even need to rinse them. Gradually stir the eggs into the butter. Then stir in the orange juice. Lastly, mix in the flour as gently as possible. Pour and spread it into the pan, and bake until the center springs back when you lightly press it with your fingertip, about 20-30 minutes.  Note: To make a chocolate cake, omit the orange juice and stir in two tablespoons of cocoa powder. Or, to get more chocolate flavor out of the cocoa, melt the butter and get it very hot. Stir in the cocoa and let it stand until the butter cools to room temperature and re-solidifies. Note 2: If you're worried that the cake won't rise, you can either use self-raising flour or mix one teaspoon of baking powder into all-purpose flour. "In the Kitchen," The Southern Districts Advocate; Katanning, Western Australia; July 8, 1935; page 3

I've had a good time flipping through the recipes from The Southern Districts Advocate. They're very ordinary-looking instead of aspirational, so it's interesting peep into the kitchens over there and back then. A lot of recipes in other newspapers come off like people telling you how you should cook instead of printing the sort of things people would actually make. Also, Australia's newspapers are free to browse. Even my local library can't afford a Newspapers.com subscription.

The Southern Districts Advocate; Katanning, Western Australia; July 8, 1935

So, this is basically a pound cake made the really old-fashioned way. This was already old-fashioned when it went to print in 1935.

First, you take one pound each of eggs, sugar, butter, and flour. Just like in the pre-industrial days, you use the eggs you had on hand instead of standard-size scale weights. Then before mixing everything, you thoroughly whip the eggs to leaven the cake. At the very end of the recipe, you add the flour and try not to deflate the air you've beaten into everything else.

I thought that perhaps the writers meant for us to add baking powder to the flour. Perhaps it would have been obvious to anyone clipping this recipe out of the newspaper in 1935. But from what I can tell, the people in charge of "In the Kitchen" were very careful to specify self-raising flour whenever the need arose. So I think this cake is raised the same way we measure it: the old old old way. That is to say, we beat a lot of air into it and appreciate that we now have electric mixers. Remember Miss Leslie's jelly cake? 

 

I've made a lot of recipes that involved two mixers, but this is the first time I've ever used two mixers simultaneously. In one power socket, our handmixer was beating the butter and sugar "to a cream." Meanwhile in the stand mixer, the eggs were revolving in the bowl until they had become a tawny whipped cream.  

The instructions simply tell us to "add eggs well beaten." I soon suspected that I missed some implied steps because our batter turned into a curdled mess. 

Rarely does anything good come from batter that looks like this.

As I saw my cake heading toward failure, I considered adding some baking powder as insurance. Then, I thought I might divide the batter in half and make one cake with baking powder and the other as The Southern Districts Advocate apparently intended. This would let me try the recipe as written and also have a backup cake. But as I was weighing out my ingredients, I decided the heck with it! I will bet an entire batch of cake batter on this recipe! 

Our batter looked promisingly whipped and fluffed after getting the flour in there. I began to think that we would actually have a genuine cake on our hands. Perhaps I got some cosmic insurance by waiting to take out the trash. The spirits may have decided not to ruin the cake since I was already prepared to throw out the evidence.

This cake smelled amazing as it baked. I know it contains the same ingredients as practically every other cake in existence, but somehow the kitchen smelled so much better. And afterward, it actually looked bubbly on top, as if it had risen into something better than a pan of stodge.

As we found upon slicing, this rose into a very nice (if somewhat dense) pound cake. Really, I should have made this in mini-loaf pans instead of a round one. You can add a teaspoon or two of baking powder if you're worried, but the cake didn't seem to need it.

Full disclosure: the cake is such a rich yellow because I added food coloring.

The flavor did need a little extra pep, though. I should have grated the orange rind into it (and maybe added a few spices). I was thrilled with my success but not excited about eating it. Since I hate waste, I stacked most of it into a trifle. This cake has that perfect firm texture to support lots of whipped cream and custard.

I don't mean that the whipped cream and everything hid an underwhelming cake. I mean that everything complemented each other perfectly. I really liked what we had at the end of stacking it. If you really like a good trifle (or refrigerator cake, as I've seen them called), this is the perfect recipe for it. 

 

Depression Cake: or, Lamenting a badly butchered cow

I hope this isn't the cake for our times.

Depression Cake 1 cup shortening (or butter, or drippings) 1 cup sugar, white or brown (I use brown) 2 cups raisins* 1 cup water Pumpkin spice seasoning to taste ½ tsp ginger 1 tsp salt Grated rind of 1 orange or lemon, if desired† 1 tsp baking soda 2 tbsp water 2½ cups flour Melt the shortening in a saucepan. Add the brown sugar, raisins, water, spices, salt, and citrus rind. Bring to a boil and cook, stirring constantly, for 5 minutes. Remove from heat, put a lid on it, and let it cool all the way to room temperature. (You don't necessarily need a lid, but it does keep out any tiny flying creatures while the pot sits out all day.) It's very important to cool it completely-- otherwise, the flour will turn into a gummy mess when you mix it in. While you're waiting, prepare a loaf pan. Cut three pieces of parchment paper the size of the bottom of the pan. (Or cut one big piece and fold it into thirds.) Coat the pan with cooking spray, then press each paper into place. When the mixture in the saucepan is completely cooled, heat oven to 350°. Stir the saucepan to mix the everything that has separated. Dissolve the baking soda in 2 tablespoons water, then stir it in. Then mix in the flour. Pour and spread into the pan. Bake for 1½-2 hours, or until a toothpick, knife, or skewer inserted in the center comes out clean. Note: If halving the recipe, it will fit very nicely in an 8-inch round pan. *The original recipe uses 1 cup each golden raisins and currants. We can't get currants here in the US, and we already had dark raisins in the house. Don't special-order ingredients for a recipe that's supposed to save your budget. †The original recipe called for candied peel, but you can't really get that here outside of fruitcake season. And even then, it tends to be cheap and taste like candied wax. "In the Kitchen," The Southern Districts Advocate; Katanning, Western Australia; 12 June 1933; page 1

Under normal circumstances, I wouldn't casually make a cake with beef fat. But...

My parents recently split a cow with another one of my relatives. Yes, a whole cow. They co-purchased the animal on the hoof, and it was raised on my uncle's pasture. (At least I think it was my uncle's pasture.) When it was big enough, it went away in the back of a trailer and came back on dry ice.

They were very generous with the resulting meat, sending me off with a lot of ground beef. (Everyone in my family knows I don't like steaks.) And it was the best-tasting beef I've had in a long time. If you've never splurged on pasture-raised beef, I highly recommend it if your budget allows and if you eat beef. You'll be amazed at how much, well, beefier it tastes.

Unfortunately, the people at the processing plant got a lot of bone shards in the meat. I cracked a tooth on a meatball-mushroom pie and had to make a surprise dental appointment. I later found out that I'm not the only one who's gotten horrible calcium supplements in the hamburger. However, I am the first to have a dental emergency from one. After I got into the dentist's chair and signed the paper on the clipboard, the booby-trapped meat cost approximately one quarter of a live cow.

Let's set aside the expense for a moment, as hard as that may be. I know people often say this sort of thing while waving vegetarian tracts, but an animal literally died for that meat. Then a processing plant wasted its life with shitty knifework. If we're going to kill animals and eat them, the least we can do is respect their lives enough to do it right.

 

With all that said, I wanted to get what I could out of the meat. First, I cooked it to save the juice that comes out (it's great for soups and gravies). I felt both better and worse about feeding beef to the garbage can as I found more bone shards while stirring the pot. Who wants to book two emergency dental appointments in one week?

Next, I simmered the meat for an hour or three-- or really, until the smell of wasted beef galled me enough to turn off the stove. Only then did I finally send it where I swore no groceries would go.

I will never find words for how much this infuriated me.

After getting out a strainer, we had a very flavorful stock (if only we could have kept the meat too!) that wobbled gelatinously in the pot.

I couldn't resist trying to unmold it. Our beef runoff came out of its pot far better than any gelatin I've ever tried to serve freestanding.

I had a horrible urge to suspend canned peas in this thing.

A lot of fat rendered off as we were cooking the beef. Which brings us, at last, to today's recipe.

The Southern Districts Advocate; Katanning, Western Australia; 12 June 1933

I loved that the newspaper openly called it a "Depression Cake" in the middle of the actual Depression. It's so much nicer than pretending that people were making a low-cost cake because that's where the winds of inspiration happened to blow them.

Before I could make it, I had to find out what the heck "half a packet of mixed spice" might be. What spices are in it, and how big is a packet (or half of one)? At first I was going to see what they have in Australian supermarkets. Then I realized that packaging might have changed since the 1930s.

Selecting a major Australian city at random, I emailed the public library in Melbourne asking what half a packet of mixed spice would have been in the 1930s. When I didn't hear back for a few weeks, I figured they thought I was messing with the librarians and deleted my message. I picked another city and tried again, contacting the library in Perth. In just a few hours, someone replied:

After a bit of digging, it looks like the spice mix will likely have been a mix of cinnamon, nutmeg, cloves, and allspice. The spice tins of the time were between 1 ounce and 1.25 ounces, depending on the spice. Averaging this and halving it equates to around 15-20 grams of the mixed spices, which roughly matches up with modern depression cake recipes (they tend to be around 20 grams of spices). I hope it turns out well!

I note that he said that the spices are about the same in "modern depression cake recipes." Do people still make them semi-often in Australia?

A little over a month later, I got a very long email from the library of Melbourne that started with:

Thank you for your patience while I researched this query. It was far more challenging than I anticipated but the answer is hilariously simple: Half a packet of mixed spice in 1933 is roughly equivalent to half a packet of mixed spice now. That is, around 12 grams.

There followed multiple citations of similar eggless cake recipes and extant antique spice packaging. They also linked to a Wikipedia article for mixed spice while tacitly not mentioning that the answer was on Wikipedia the whole time. (Apparently "Hoyts" is a very common brand.) The beautifully detailed message concluded with a cheery "I hope this information is of use, I realise there is a lot! Do get in touch and let me know if you make the cake, it sounds delicious!"

Before I got this message, I hadn't really decided whether to make the recipe. It looked a lot like a war cake when I read it, and we've made that many, many times. But I simply could not drop the recipe after someone did so much research for me. So I decided we would make a depression cake, if for nothing else so I could send a worthy answer.

Comparing today's depression cake to the war cake we know and make often, the newspaper's recipe uses a lot more shortening than the two spoons that make a war. Isn't it fortunate that I have all this beef fat lying around?

On a side note, I hate that beef fat has turned into a political cause for a certain subset of conservatives. They're making me look weird by association. I'm not pretending that beef fat is a superfood, and I'm not pretending that "they" don't want you to have it (whoever "they" might be). I just didn't want to throw away food at today's prices. 

Anyway, back to the cake. You could really see the beefy difference after the boiled mixture had cooled back down. Usually when we make a war cake, we don't have a whole pot roast's worth of congealed fat on top.

Looks like last night's pot roast, doesn't it?

I told myself this is about as much fat as we usually put into a cake recipe (though usually it's butter), but it couldn't prop up my shaking faith in The Southern Districts Advocate. 

Things looked better after we stirred everything together. The raisin syrup was thick enough (if barely so) to keep the fat from floating back to the top.

Raisin-beef compote, anyone?

After adding the flour, the batter looked like it would never change any raisin-hater's mind. 

The recipe tells us to put three sheets of paper in the pan. At first I thought that was excessive, but this bakes for a long time. Perhaps the extra paper saves the bottom of the cake from blackening before the center is done.

As I slid our cake into the oven, I had horrible visions of beef fat melting and separating out. After all, we don't have any eggs in there to force the fat and water to mix. I couldn't stop thinking about the one time I forgot to crack an egg into brownie mix and got a pan of hot brown clods in boiling fat. (Side note: I'm pretty sure brownie mix used to taste better. I may have nostalgia bias, but I remember actually liking it.)

Potential fat separation aside, I thought the 2-hour baking time was excessive. But I inserted a skewer at 20 minutes and the batter hadn't even started to firm up.

By the time it was cooked through to the center, the raisins had puffed up on top and the cake looked thoroughly dead.

Well they did say it's a dark cake.

It was a pretty decent gingerbread when you cut into it. Granted, the raisins were a bit overcooked by the time the rest of the cake was done, but I wasn't mad. (Maybe the cake was ready a while before I checked it.)

This wasn't a cake so much as really dense cookie-bars. It would seem out of place on a cake stand, but it'd be great to find a slice in one's lunch box (or lunch pail since this was the 1930s). Also, the Southern Districts Advocate was not kidding when they called this a rich cake. A small piece sates you.

Now, the recipe does say it the cake "will keep for weeks in an air-tight tin." I don't have any cake tins lying around (otherwise I'd have to ask people to give them back whenever I give away cakes), but I did encase it in several layers of plastic wrap. It was still pretty good about a week later.