Foodish History: A Tale of Two Carrot Cakes
The cream-cheese covered cake I usually bake is a far cry from a wartime carrot cake, as I discovered when I cooked them both as research for my novel Heart in the Clouds.
Modern Carrot Cake (top) and WWII Carrot Cake.
I love the way carrot brings moisture and density to a cake, and how you can compliment its sweetness with different warming spices and dried fruits or nuts. Ordinarily, I use Hugh Fearnley Whittingstall’s recipe from his River Cottage Everyday cookbook when I get a hankering for carrot cake. It’s a simple recipe with not too many ingredients (my favourite kind!) but I modify it a little, by adding a teaspoon of warming chai-style spices for a more complex flavour.
I don’t cook carrot cake all that often due to complaints from the children (see above). As much as I love it, even I can’t chomp through a whole cake – or at least I shouldn’t! But when I do, I often slather the top with cream cheese frosting, add edible rose petals, pistachios for crunch and some orange or lemon zest to make the whole thing pop. This turns a simple cake into something quite extravagant – beautiful to look at as well as a treat for the taste buds.
But did you know that such decadence was illegal in wartime England?
Austerity cake
While I was visiting London in 2019, I picked up a little book called Victory in the Kitchen: Wartime Recipes. It contains recipes that came out of the UK’s Ministry of Food during the war. The Ministry of Food was the government department that rationed food in the UK during the war, as well as advocated for the inventive use of it in the home to keep up morale. They promoted carrot as an extra sweetener in cakes and biscuits to partly replace sugar which was heavily rationed. And they outlawed icing on cakes because it was considered wasteful!
I strongly associate carrot cake with the war, so I was interested to check out the carrot cake recipe in the book. (This recipe from the National Trust is similar, if you want to see it laid out.) I didn’t expect that the cake I cooked would be so different to a modern carrot cake – but also so delicious in its own way.
Even though carrot was being used for both sweetness and flavour in the wartime recipe, there was barely any carrot in the cake, compared with my modern one. While my River Cottage recipe uses 3-4 medium carrots (350g), this WWII one calls for less than one (1½ tablespoons of grated carrot or about 100g). It’s like carrot is a novelty ingredient and not a feature.
Modern ingredients in a WWII recipe
The WWII cake didn’t have the flavour or moisture you would expect in carrot cake. In fact, the texture of this WWII was more like a large scone. This is probably due to the method being similar to making good scones. You rub the fat into the flour, combine with the other dry ingredients, then add the wet ingredients, being careful not to over-mix everything. The recipe made a much smaller cake than we would expect of a modern recipe. It fit perfectly in a 20cm diameter tin that was 5cm deep, whereas my modern recipe needs a bigger and deeper tin.
I used wholemeal rosella flour from Woodstock Flour and spreadable butter, both of which I thought would be similar to the flour and margarine available in the 1940s. The recipe called for a fairly significant portion of oatmeal too (I used quick oats). Carrot and oats were one of the Ministry of Food’s classic combinations during the war, because both those things were grown in Britain and had significant health benefits for the population.
The WWII recipe doesn’t rely entirely on carrot for sweetness. There is a small portion of sugar as well as dried fruit (I used sultanas soaked in hot water) and ‘syrup’. I'm not sure what that meant in the WWII context – probably golden syrup or malt syrup – but I used maple syrup because I had it to hand.
A palate from a different era
I’m fairly sure that British palates deprived of sugar would think the WWII carrot cake was sweet, but it was fairly bland to my modern taste buds. It didn’t taste bad, just plain – much like a scone before additional toppings are added. Adding apricot jam and butter to this recipe would be delicious. It would also work well with a simple glaze made from icing sugar and water. Although both those things would have been impossible in WWII England due to rationing and restrictions.
Presumably the population were able to keep calm and carry on despite that.
He’s a charismatic Australian bomber pilot used to beating the odds.
She’s the straight-laced radio operator he speaks to each night before he flies.
Read more from Jen’s Journal
