How to bake a First World War trench cake

During the First World War people in Britain would bake and post a fruit cake to loved
ones on the front line. Some traditional cake ingredients were hard to come by.

http://i.telegraph.co.uk/multimedia/...2_2944759b.jpg


There are no eggs in this recipe and vinegar was used to react with the baking soda to
help the cake rise.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/history/w...ench-cake.html

No eggs... but nutmeg, ginger, and lemon - all of which I would have expected to be harder to source during a war than eggs.

The nutmeg and ginger could have been in cupboards for years....it lasts a long time, and people may have had it prior to the war already. Maybe the lemon was zested and dried and stored? I would have thought the lemon would be the hardest to find......

I wonder how this tastes?

Quote:

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Originally Posted by HerMajesty

The nutmeg and ginger could have been in cupboards for years....it lasts a long time, and people may have had it prior to the war already. Maybe the lemon was zested and dried and stored? I would have thought the lemon would be the hardest to find......

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- Yes I would agree that those would seem a lot more difficult to source. The eggs may have been kept for troops or other... however many of that era may have had chickens in the garden even a small yard, continued from Victorian times... and I think for WWII that you were given egg or chicken feed rations...
Maybe there was a special allowance given out at Christmas to encourage people to make the cake for relatives?


Ingredients 1/2lb flour

4 oz margarine

1 teaspoon vinegar
1/4 pint of milk
3 oz brown sugar
3 oz cleaned currants (cleaned... were they sold dirty or does cleaned mean something else eg deseeded?)
2 teaspoons cocoa (in a fruit cake!)
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
nutmeg
ginger
grated lemon rind
Method
Grease a cake tin. Rub margarine into the flour in a basin. Add the dry ingredients. Mix well. Add the soda dissolved in vinegar and milk. Beat well. Turn into the tin. Bake in a moderate oven for about two hours.

Dried Fruit was always washed before use until very recently.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by madelaine

Dried Fruit was always washed before use until very recently.

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Yes, you are right and I still wash it - old habits dying hard!

As for eggs - that is a puzzle as many working class people were still keeping chickens in the yard well after WWII! I know they were rationed in that second conflict and we met "dried eggs" for the first time, but we had no egg problem anyway. We lived in a mid terrace house with no rear entrance and still kept chickens.

Crazy things happened though. I can remember my mother being very puzzled. We children were told to take a large tin to school one day as a food hamper had arrived from Australia. It was cocoa powder!!! :D