Election Cake: America’s Lost Democratic Tradition
Picture this: voters traveling for days to reach polling places, and entire communities gathering to celebrate democracy with massive, spiced cakes that could weigh as much as twelve pounds. Election cake was a special food reserved for when Americans treated Election Day as a revered holiday, with professional bakers and ordinary townswomen serving hearty cakes to men who traveled to villages to vote, a process that usually took days because of the long distances required to reach polling places in rural America. During the colonial era in New England, English immigrants and their descendants put naturally leavened, highly spiced fruit cakes at the center of political rituals, and these desserts took on different names and forms depending on the context in which they were baked and eaten in North America.
The first published recipe for election cake is credited to a white woman named Amelia Simmons who wrote American Cookery in 1796. In this era, when voting was a privilege granted to only the few – elite, property-owning white men – preparing, sharing, and consuming election cake was an informal way for some nonvoting American women to participate in the revelry surrounding election season, and unable to cast their own votes, they nevertheless contributed to the civic culture of celebrating the young republic through food. Election cake largely vanished from political traditions by the early twentieth century, and when recipes for it appeared in cookbooks of that era, they reflected new ingredients and altered techniques.
War Cake: The Dessert That Fed Millions During Hard Times
When ingredients became scarce during wartime, American ingenuity shined through in the form of War Cake – a dense, spiced dessert that proved you could make something sweet from almost nothing. These cakes were known as “War Cake” because they avoided ingredients that were scarce or were being conserved for the use of soldiers. Depression cake has been referred to as “War Cake” by texts dating back to World War I, and in a pamphlet distributed by the United States Food Administration in 1918 entitled “War Economy in Food,” War Cake is listed under “Recipes for Conservation Sweets,” with the United States Food Administration stressing the importance of reducing sugar consumption during the war and offering molasses, corn syrup, and raisins in its place.
Boiled raisin-type cakes date back at least to the American Civil War. When the Great Depression hit America following the Stock Market Crash of 1929, families were forced to stretch their budgets and “make do” with minimal and cheap ingredients when cooking, with some women having to feed their families on five dollars per week, and dessert becoming a luxury for most, making depression cake a more affordable alternative to other cakes that used milk, eggs, and butter. Affordability was achieved through ingredient substitution, for example, shortening was substituted for butter, water was substituted for milk, and baking powder was substituted for eggs.
Sally Lunn: The Huguenot Refugee’s Breakfast Gift
Behind this golden, brioche-like bread lies a tale of religious persecution and culinary survival that shaped both English and American breakfast traditions. A Sally Lunn is a large bun or teacake, a type of batter bread, made with a yeast dough including cream and eggs, similar to the sweet brioche breads of France, and sometimes served warm and sliced, with butter, it was recorded in the spa town of Bath in southwest England by 1780. In 1680 a young Huguenot refugee fled France in fear of her life as the Catholic church hunted for heretical protestants, Solange Luyon survived the perilous crossing of the channel and found safety and a warm welcome in England, soon settling in the spa town of Bath where she found work in the bakery on Lilliput Alley.
There are many variations of Sally Lunn cake in American cuisine, some made with yeast, with variations that add cornmeal, sour cream or buttermilk to the basic recipe, and the recipe was brought to the United States by British colonists with new American variations developed through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. British colonists enjoyed this food tradition enough to carry it across an ocean, where it continued to evolve in form and recipe throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, with an 1892 newspaper article claiming that George Washington was so fond of Sally Lunn that it became known as “Washington’s breakfast bread” or “federal bread”. In the eighteenth century Sally Lunns were eaten hot and buttered for breakfast.
Syllabub: The Elizabethan Party Drink Turned Dessert
Long before champagne became the celebration drink of choice, there was syllabub – a frothy, wine-spiked cream that graced English tables from the sixteenth century onward. Syllabub is a sweet dish made by curdling cream or milk with an acid such as wine or cider, it was a popular British confection from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries, and the holiday punch, sweet and frothy, was often considered a ladies’ drink. Early recipes for syllabub are for a drink of cider with milk, and by the seventeenth century it had evolved into a type of dessert made with sweet white wine, with more wine being added to make a punch, but it could also be made to have a thicker consistency that could be eaten with a spoon, used as a topping for trifle, or to dip fingers of sponge cake into.
Ironically syllabub started life not as a classy dessert but as a Medieval drink and right up to the end of the seventeenth century it was the traditional love-token exchanged between milk-maids and their sweethearts, known simply as a ‘from the cow’ recipe, in this version, the cow was milked directly into a bowl of crab apple verjus, sugar or honey. Hannah Glasse, in the eighteenth century, published the recipe for whipt syllabubs in The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy. Since the mid-eighteenth century, it has also been used as one of the layers of a trifle.
Trifle: The Layered Marvel That Conquered Dinner Parties
Before there were elaborate birthday cakes, there was trifle – a show-stopping dessert that allowed home cooks to create edible architecture in glass bowls. Two recipes for what now is considered a trifle first appeared in the mid-eighteenth century in England, both describing biscuits soaked in wine layered with custard and covered in a whipped syllabub froth, one in the fourth edition of Hannah Glasse’s The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy (1751) and the other by an unknown author entitled The Whole Duty of a Woman (1751). Jelly is first recorded as part of a trifle recipe in Hannah Glasse’s ‘A grand trifle’ in her book The Compleat Confectioner (1760), with her recipe instructing the reader to use calves’ feet to make a rich calves-foot jelly, and to half fill the dish with this jelly.
The late nineteenth century was, according to food historian Annie Gray, “a sort of heyday” for trifles and by the early 1900s there were “a bewildering number of recipes” in print, with thirteen in The Encyclopaedia of Practical Cookery: A Complete Dictionary of All Pertaining to the Art of Cookery and Table Service (8 volumes, 1891), from Theodore Francis Garrett, alone. The English cookery writer Jane Grigson describes her version, which includes macaroons, Frontignan wine, brandy, eggs, raspberry jam and everlasting syllabub, as “a pudding worth eating, not the mean travesty made with yellow, packaged sponge cakes, poor sherry and powdered custard”.
Cowboy Cake: The Wild West’s Eggless Wonder
When the American frontier called, pioneers had to get creative with dessert – and Cowboy Cake proved that ingenuity could produce sweetness even in the harshest conditions. Cowboy Cake is an example of American baking deliciousness born of hard times, and when cowboys moved out West, they didn’t bring hens with them, so instead of eggs, they “made do by cooking down raisins into a thick syrup that magically moistens and leavens the cake without eggs and with very little fat”. This remarkable adaptation shows how necessity truly became the mother of invention in American frontier cooking.
What makes Cowboy Cake particularly fascinating is how it challenges our modern assumptions about what makes a cake work. Without eggs for binding or butter for richness, frontier cooks relied on the natural sugars and moisture from raisins to create a tender crumb. The dried fruit was boiled down until it formed a thick, syrupy base that could support flour and basic spices. The result was a dense, moist cake that could survive the rough conditions of cattle drives and remote settlements. It represented democracy in dessert form – anyone could make it, anywhere, with the most basic ingredients available on the frontier.
Angel Food Cake: The Pennsylvania Dutch Waste-Not Wonder
Born from the Pennsylvania Dutch philosophy that nothing should go to waste, Angel Food Cake transformed leftover egg whites into something heavenly. Angel Food Cake is the child of frugality, created by Pennsylvania Dutch cooks who couldn’t bear to let the egg whites left over from noodle-making go to waste. The classic story behind the name “angel food cake” is that this dessert is so white, light, and fluffy it must be fit for angels, and cake recipes with the name “angel food” began showing up in American cookbooks sometime in the late nineteenth century, about the same time as mass-produced bakeware hit the popular market.
Some food historians speculate the Pennsylvania Dutch were probably the original makers and namers of angel food, though this connection has not been fully documented. The cake represents a perfect example of how immigrant communities adapted their Old World thrift to New World ingredients and techniques. Those Pennsylvania German settlers, known for their efficient use of every ingredient, created something magnificent from what others might consider kitchen scraps. The technique required patience and skill – beating egg whites to perfect peaks without the benefit of electric mixers – making it a true test of a home baker’s prowess.
Devil’s Food Cake: The Dark Counterpart to Angelic Sweetness
If Angel Food Cake was pure and white as heavenly clouds, then Devil’s Food Cake was its sinfully dark and rich opposite – a chocolate indulgence that embraced temptation. How this chocolate cake came to be called devil’s food no one knows although it may have been a play on opposites: it was as dark and rich as angel food was light and airy, and Devils Food, dense, chocolatey rich and “sinful,” answered Angel Food decades later in the twentieth century. Some food historians believe the first mention of Devil’s food appears in a memoir written by Caroline King’s of her childhood in 1880s Chicago, where Ms. King was a popular food writer in the 1920s-1930s, and she wrote “Devil’s Food, though a new cake in our household, had made its dashing appearance in Chicago in the middle eighties, and by the time it reached our quiet little community, was quite the rage”.
As for that perennial blockbuster, the chocolate cake, who’d have thought this gooey bomb, which made its appearance in the late 1800s, would have a science connection, as “It was the time of Edison and electricity,” with “these cooking schools in Boston and Philadelphia which focused on exact measurements and making healthy foods with this new energy-giving ingredient, chocolate,” and chocolate companies hired these ladies to create recipes. The first chocolate cake was called Mahogany Cake, and it was very pale compared to the deep, dark cakes today.
Boiled Raisin Cake: The Depression-Era Survivor
Sometimes known as “Poor Man’s Cake,” this humble dessert kept families fed during America’s darkest economic times while proving that sweetness could emerge from the simplest ingredients. A common depression cake is also known as “Boiled Raisin Cake,” “Milkless, Eggless, Butterless Cake,” or “Poor Man’s Cake,” with “Boiled” referring to the boiling of raisins with the sugar and spices to make a syrup base early in the recipe. This cake is commonly known as a “Depression Era” cake, these cakes are also known as “war cakes” and the popularity of recipes date back to World War I, with some recipes for “boiled cakes” found in cookbooks dating back to the Civil War.
Radio shows and women’s periodicals played a large role in circulating recipes of the era during the Great Depression, with “Betty Crocker’s Cooking Hour” being one such show that provided women with budget-friendly recipes. This cake traveled well because it had no butter, eggs or milk, making it perfect for families sending care packages to soldiers during WWII, with some families making it every year during the holidays, particularly on Christmas Day, adding dates with raisins and ground nutmeg. By either name this is one delicious, moist raisin spice cake and although it is made without eggs or milk, you would never know it, and it stays moist for days in a covered container.
Battenberg Cake: The Royal Wedding Celebration
With its distinctive checkerboard pattern of pink and yellow sponge wrapped in marzipan, Battenberg cake represents Victorian confectionery artistry at its most ambitious. A popular theory about its origin tells us it was made to celebrate an important Victorian royal wedding in 1884, with food historian Catherine Brown explaining that “there was nothing to compare with the German pastry cooks’ sophisticated use of marzipan, colours, shapes, flavours and allegorical designs,” and “when Queen Victoria’s granddaughter, Princess Victoria of Hesse-Darmstadt, married Prince Louis of Battenberg in 1884, it was decided that a celebration cake was required”.
The cake’s construction requires significant skill – bakers must create two different colored sponges, cut them precisely, and arrange them in the alternating pattern that creates the signature checkerboard effect when sliced. The entire creation is then wrapped in a layer of marzipan, which serves both as decoration and preservation. However, food historian Catherine Brown’s sources for these statements about the royal wedding origin remain unclear, leading some to believe she is simply repeating a popular anecdote which appears to have surfaced fairly recently and has no basis in fact. A Victorian food magazine called The Table from July 1898 featured an illustrated recipe for an identical cake called Gateau à la Domino.
Indian Pound Cake: America’s First Indigenous Ingredient Adaptation
As European settlers adapted their baking traditions to New World ingredients, Indian Pound Cake emerged as one of the earliest examples of true American innovation in dessert making. One of the earliest cakes to use an American ingredient was the Indian Pound Cake, which used corn meal, known then as “Indian meal,” with other inventions – the hickory nut cake and black walnut cake – using nuts indigenous to the New World, which is why a grandmother’s cake recipe will usually have walnuts in it. This cake represents the beginning of what would become a uniquely American approach to baking – taking European techniques and adapting them with native ingredients.
The use of cornmeal in place of some wheat flour created a different texture and subtle flavor that distinguished American cakes from their European ancestors. Cornmeal added a slight grittiness and golden color that reminded bakers of the abundant maize that had sustained indigenous peoples for centuries. The cake bridged two worlds – honoring European baking traditions while embracing the agricultural reality of the New World. It showed how culinary innovation often happens not through radical reinvention, but through thoughtful adaptation of available ingredients to established techniques.
