This past weekend, my daughter and I emerged from quarantine to take our daily hike, this time to the neighborhood market two miles away to buy ingredients we couldn’t find at our regular grocery store: rice and white flour. On the walk home, my daughter recalled a victory garden/wartime rationing display we saw last summer.
It sure feels like wartime rationing. We wanted the flour to make biscuits because the store was running dangerously low on bread.
I remember seeing a WWI/WWII recipe for flourless chocolate cake at the Montana Historical Society Museum in Helena, Mont., but I couldn’t find it when I couldn’t find flour. A search through the University of Wisconsin-Madison Libraries’ digital offerings, however, turned up the Recipe for Victory: Food and Cooking in Wartime collection. The collection includes entire cookbooks of alternative-ingredient recipes.
With the warm weather, we expect to get our tomatoes into the ground soon – our own victory garden of sorts. In the meantime, check out the University of Wisconsin Digital Collections Center’s recipes.
Here are two from “Best War Time Recipes,” published in 1918 by the Royal Baking Powder Co. in New York. Despite the many empty shelves at the grocery store, I did find brown sugar (no white sugar) and several alternatives to white all-purpose flour. I just didn’t know what to do with those alternative flours at the time.
Eggless, Milkless, Butterless Cake (Fruit Cake)
- 1 c. brown sugar
- 1 ¼ c. water
- 1 c. seeded raisins
- 2 oz. citron, cut fine
- ½ c. shortening
- ½ tsp. salt
- 1 tsp. nutmeg
- 1 tsp. cinnamon
- 1 c. corn or wheat flour
- 1 c. rye or barley flour
- 5 tsp. baking powder
All ingredients are measured level. Boil sugar, water, fruit, shortening, salt, and spices together in saucepan three minutes. When cool, add flour and baking powder, which have been sifted together. Mix well. Bake in loaf pan in moderate oven about 45 minutes.
Chocolate Cake
- ½ c. shortening
- 1 c. brown sugar
- 2 square chocolate
- 1 c. rye or barley flour
- ½ c. wheat flour
- 3 tsp. baking powder
- ½ tsp. salt
- ½ c. milk
- 1 tsp. vanilla
- 1 c. walnuts
All ingredients are measured level. Cream shortening. Add sugar and melted chocolate. Add half the flour which has been sifted with the baking powder and salt. Mix well and add the milk. Add the remainder of the flour, vanilla, and nuts, which have been chopped. Bake in greased loaf pan in moderate oven 35 to 45 minutes.