Cowboy-Style Cakes Skipped The Eggs And Cut The Fat With This Sticky Swap

So much of human history can be defined by the things we ate and why we ate them when the great and terrible events of the world were happening all around us. Baking in particular — because of its need for delicate, sometimes inaccessible staple ingredients like flour, sugar, eggs, and milk — can often tell us more about the lives of ordinary people than any number of dates or battles or the names of famous men.

Take, for example, the cowboys riding the trail or the pioneers of the American West. These were men and women who spent months living rough, eating only what they could carry or forage, and having to make do with supplies that could survive the long journey. They couldn't bring chickens with them, so they had no eggs. Things like butter and milk could too easily spoil. But still, people want to have cake, so clever scratch bakers of the time used a simple dried fruit that could help moisten and leaven the batter without requiring ingredients they didn't have. They used boiled raisins.

It seems ridiculous at first, but hydrating raisins and cooking them down into a syrup allowed them to make a kind of dense, almost fruitcake-like dessert that didn't require any eggs or milk. It could even be done without shortening in a pinch. And today, this technique is being rediscovered by vegan bakers as a way to add moisture and structure to a cake without using any animal products.

Also called Poor Man's Cake (because of the recipe's popularity during the Great Depression) or War Cake, due to ration controls of certain ingredients during wartime, this cowboy cake trick has you simmer raisins in water until the fruit plumps and the liquid boils down to a sweet syrup. This liquid is reserved, spiced with cinnamon and nutmeg, then sweetened with brown sugar or molasses. If you have butter or shortening, it can be added, but the cake still works without it. The raisin syrup adds moisture and its own natural sugars to the cake, starches to hold the crumb together without needing eggs or fats, and it reacts with the baking soda to allow the whole mixture to rise.

Cowboys and pioneers baked this cake in Dutch ovens, but it also works in a pan in the oven. One of its advantages at the time was that it kept well — staying moist for days after baking. If you want to add some depth and contrasting flavor, some recipes call for simmering the raisins in black coffee along with the spices. 

So will this boiled raisin cowboy dessert turn out like the light and fluffy cakes we're accustomed to eating today? No. This thing can turn into an absolute brick if you're not careful (and lucky). But if you're trying to make a fully vegan cake, curious about the flavors born out of past hardships, or just attempting to bake something sweet while short on a few basic staples, this low-fat, milk-less and egg-free historical solution might be exactly what you're looking for.