This Vintage Canadian Wartime Cake Has No Eggs, Butter, Or Milk

People tend to get remarkably creative with their foods during wartime. Americans in World War II, for instance, had their "Emergency Steaks" (which were actually fashioned from ground beef), while the British came up with hot portions of "Blitz Soup" while waiting out air raids in the Underground. But a story we rarely hear is Canada's wartime food experience. Along with the rest of the Commonwealth, Canada joined the Allies in 1939, and Canadian families would then face many of the same challenges as their neighbors to the south and across the pond – namely food shortages and strict rationing. The Canadian people also rose to the challenge by making a ration-proof cake.

In the book "How to Eat Well Though Rationed: Wartime Canning and Cooking Book," you can find a curious-sounding recipe called the "Eggless, Butterless, Milkless Cake" in the desserts section. As the name suggests, you'll find absolutely none of these essential baking staples in this deliberately pared-down loaf cake. Instead, people used whatever they could get their hands on. That means hot water was used in place of milk. For the fat, people would use shortening rather than butter. And eggs? Well, they're left out of the recipe entirely. Brown sugar was used for sweetness, though many families substituted it for other sweeteners like molasses, or used the natural sweetness of seedless raisins to add a touch of indulgence to their wartime dessert.

Although the War Cake rose to prominence during World War II, it's actually been around for far longer than that. After all, it wasn't the first war or crisis that the Canadian people had gone through in that period.

The earliest mention of the Canadian War Cake was in a 1916 book called "Allied Cookery: British, French, Italian, Belgian, Russian" by Gertrude Clergue and Grace Clergue Harrison. In it, Canadian troops participating in the Great War (World War I) were said to make and eat the "Great War Cake" as a type of "trench cake." It's simply brown sugar, flour, and basic spices stirred together in a lard-coated saucepan. The cake became such a legend that publications that shared the War Cake recipe, like the Windsor Daily Star on March 14th, 1942 (well into World War II), didn't forget to pay homage to its history when they published it. In it, a "Mrs. Graham" made sure to mention that the cake was "also from the last war."

Between the two wars, the recipe didn't see many changes. The core for an egg-butter-milk-less cake remains the same — just that some ingredients are swapped out depending on what's available. You can also make one with what you've got in your kitchen. Times aren't as hard now, and odds are good that using what you could scrounge up in a minute alone, you could make yourself a cake far tastier than the War Cake. But if you want to have a taste of history, why not?