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.