Category: food history

India Cake

vintage ad for Burnett's almond extract

A 1916 advertisement for Burnett’s Almond Extract features a delightful, and economical, recipe for India Cake. Why economical? Because Burnett’s claims its economy comes from “its purity and strength,” which are effects of the fact that “one 2 oz. bottle of Burnett’s Almond gives more flavor than 5 ordinary 10c bottles of inferior or imitation extracts.”

The Joseph Burnett Company was incorporated in 1895 and quickly came to dominate the market in high-quality extracts. The company’s manufacturing headquarters was located in South Boston, and the beautifully restored factory that churned out extracts for worldwide distribution can still be seen today.

Though Joseph Burnett’s superior almond extract did not survive much beyond the mid-twentieth century, you can still make his famous cake by following the recipe below. Just make sure to use an almond extract just as pure and strong!

India Cake

Cream 3/4 cup butter and 2 cups sugar. Add 3 eggs, whites and yolks beaten separately and then together. Add 2 cups flour, 1 teaspoonful soda and 2 of cream of tartar. Add 1 cup milk and 1 scant teaspoonful of Burnett’s Almond. Bake in a slow oven, and frost.

 
Why Fast and Fermented Foods by Christine Baumgarthuber

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Economical Old-Fashioned Loaf Cake

loaf cakes, illustration

In an article that appeared in an 1871 edition of Southern Farm and Home, Mrs. A.T. Conyers of Georgia gives housewives newly come down in the world tips and tricks for dealing with the trials and tribulations of poverty. She encourages these beleaguered women to take over the work of the household in order to save on servants’ wages. “By doing her work she would feel an interest in saving,” she writes, “and would prevent that useless waste that so often occurs with servants.”

 

Mrs. Conyers adamantly opposes waste of all kinds. “However wealthy she [the housewife] may be, the poor are too numerous, food for them too scarce to scarce to suffer anything to be wasted. This is frequently done by carelessly allowing cold dishes to accumulate until they are ruined by mould. This is altogether unnecessary, as many dishes can be redressed to advantage.” She then offers the following advice:

Cold meat, for instance, by sprinkling a little salt over it, warming gradually, and serving with gravy, can be made almost as palatable as when fresh cooked. Any kind of bread by keeping it in a tight place from the air, when wanted, placing it in a cold oven or stove, and heating it slowly, will be as good and far healthier than new. Cold bread can also be used in making puddings, etc.

This recipe for old-fashioned loaf cake from the 1883 Dixie Cook-Book, which one reviewer claimed as “the very best and most economical of all cook books,” would likely please Mrs. A.T. Conyers. (Just make sure to do justice to the leftovers.)

Old-Fashioned Loaf Cake

Three pounds (three quarts sifted and well heaped) flour, one and a fourth pounds (a rounded pint of soft) butter, one and three-fourths pounds (one quart) sugar, five gills new milk, half pint yeast, three eggs, two pounds raisins, tea-spoon soda, gill of brandy or wine, or a fourth pint of molasses, two tea-spoons cinnamon and two of nutmeg, scald the milk, cool to blood warm, add the yeast, then the flour, to which all the butter and half the sugar have been added; then mix together, and let rise until light. It is better to set this sponge over night, and in the morning add the other ingredients (flouring raisins), and let rise again. When light, fill baking pans and let rise again. Bake in a moderate oven. This recipe makes three large loaves, and is a standard, economical loaf-cake.

 
Why Fast and Fermented Foods by Christine Baumgarthuber

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New York City Dairies

illustration from travel guide, A Week in New York

Ernest Ingersoll’s 1891 travel guide A Week in New York counsels souls inexperienced in urban travel in how best to negotiate the labyrinthine boroughs of the Big Apple. In a section entitled “Advice to Inexperienced Travelers,” Ingersoll writes,

 

An arrival in New York, or any other large city, alone and for the first time, is an ordeal to which many persons look forward with justifiable dread. What shall they do first — whither shall they go — what arrangements are to be made regarding baggage — how shall they find the proper way — how escape mischievous misleading of some sort and unnecessary expenses? These questions occur to many inexperienced travelers; and it is the purpose of this chapter to answer them, as to New York, as explicitly as possible.

Ingersoll does indeed answer these questions, as well as many more. He covers such topics as “Getting About the City,” “Racing and Athletic Sports,” and “The Rivers and Harbor.” He is especially helpful in recommending restaurants to the wary (and likely beleaguered) traveler, writing most lovingly of “a class of restaurants called dairies.” These restaurants, favorites among diners of modest means, “make milk and bread in a great variety of forms the standard nourishment, adding some simple dessert and pastries, and always berries and fruit in season.”

Perhaps the dairies of New York served a simple rice pudding, like this 1891 recipe from the famous Astor House.

Rice Pudding

Wash a teacupful of rice, and boil it in two teacupfuls of water; then add, while the rice is hot, three tablespoonfuls of butter, five tablespoonfuls of sugar, five eggs well-beaten, one tablespoonful of powdered nutmeg, a little salt, one glass of wine, a quarter of a pound of raisins, stoned and cut in halves, a quarter of a pound of Zante currants, a quarter of a pound of citron cut in slips, and one quart of cream; mix well, pour into a buttered dish and bake an hour in a moderate oven.

 
Why Fast and Fermented Foods by Christine Baumgarthuber

Would you rather receive The Austerity Kitchen by email? Then sign up for my Substack.

And, if you’d like to help the Kitchen keep cookin’, please consider picking up copies of my books, Why Fast? and Fermented Foods.

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