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Found my great-aunt's recipe for 'depression cake' from 1932, no eggs or butter | Forgotten Recipe Box - Librear

Found my great-aunt's recipe for 'depression cake' from 1932, no eggs or butter

I used to think it was just a weird old note until I made it last month and it was actually really moist. The change came when I realized the vinegar reacts with the baking soda to make it rise, which was a total game-changer for understanding how they cooked back then. Has anyone else tried baking with these kinds of pantry-only recipes from that era?

3 comments

3 Comments

nancyd854mo ago

@allen.ruby those are good questions but actually the mayonnaise thing gets misremembered a lot. Mayonnaise in cake was a Depression-era invention but it was really about replacing the oil, not the eggs, since mayo already has eggs in it. My aunt's recipe book from the late 30s has a note about using mashed potatoes in bread to stretch the flour, and sour milk was common for biscuits since they didn't have buttermilk handy. The vinegar trick my great-aunt used is basically the same principle as using lemon juice, just cheaper since vinegar was always in the cupboard. It's amazing how resourceful people had to be with just a few basic ingredients.

allen.ruby6mo ago

That vinegar trick is clever. My grandma's 1945 cookbook has a chocolate cake recipe that uses mayonnaise instead of eggs and oil. Did you find any other substitutions in her notes, like using mashed potatoes or sour milk? I'm curious how many ways they figured out to replace dairy.

riley_ramirez816mo ago

My grandma's notes are basically a guide to baking with whatever you found in the pantry that week. She had a cookie recipe that swapped butter for bacon grease, which sounds wild but honestly worked. I tried a "war cake" recipe once that used cold coffee and raisins, and it was so dense I could've used it as a doorstop. Those old cooks were just trying to make something sweet with no supplies, and we're out here struggling with a fully stocked kitchen.