Apple Sauce Cake
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You’ll find this recipe in:
A Modern Kitchen Guide
North Chicago, 1946
APPLE SAUCE CAKE
1 cup sugar
½ cup shortening
1 ½ cups unsweetened apple sauce
2 cups bread flour or (2 ½ cups cake flour)
½ cup raisins
½ cup walnut meats
¾ teaspoon soda
2 teaspoons baking powder
1 teaspoon cinnamon
½ teaspoon nutmeg
½ teaspoon cloves
¼ teaspoon salt
Cream shortening, add sugar and cream, add beaten egg and apple sauce. Sift together all dried ingredients and mix together. Bake in a loaf pan at 350 degrees for 50 minutes.
My notes on the recipe:
Let me begin with a list of alternate measurements and temperatures for those of you who don’t measure in cups and Fahrenheit:
115 g shortening
250 g white sugar
340 g apple sauce
350 g flour
50g raisins
50 g walnuts
Preheat oven to 180 C
My Apple Sauce Cake was fully baked after about 1 hour and 45 minutes at 350 F (180 C), not the 50 minutes in the recipe.
Apple Sauce Cake is a dairy-free apple & spice loaf, which has a dense but moist consistency. This recipe contains walnuts and raisins, but you could certainly swap in nuts, seeds and dried fruits of your choice.
My original idea was that I’d use Boiled Cider Apple Sauce in this recipe, but that apple sauce was too delicious. It didn’t last until I made this cake, so I ended up using another batch of apple sauce that I made from the apples in my backyard apple tree. In my opinion, the best way to eat Apple Sauce Cake is to eat it with a fork (it is crumbly), topped with natural peanut butter and Apple Butter.
Our Apple Sauce Cake recipe is from the 1946 cookbook A Modern Kitchen Guide, which was published in Chicago, but distributed by Farmer’s Advocate magazine based out of London, Ontario, Canada. I’ve found copies of A Modern Kitchen Guide for sale online from the 1930s and 1940s, featuring a variety of names on the cover: Sears, Roebuck and Co., Edison Fuel and Material Co., Washington Farmer, Lawrenceburg Roller Mills Company (Lawrenceburg, Indiana) and Ray’s Photo Service (La Crosse, Wisconsin).
A run of A Modern Kitchen Guide was also distributed by a radio show, Helene of Herpolsheimer’s, which aired daily at 8:45 am on WOOD in Michigan. Herpolsheimer’s was a department store in Grand Rapids, Michigan that was in business from the late 19th to the late 20th centuries and it is featured in the movie The Polar Express. I haven’t been able to locate any information about what the radio show was like, so if you’re familiar with Helene of Herpolsheimer’s, please leave a comment.
I also haven’t been able to locate background information about this specific cookbook, but it makes sense that A Modern Kitchen Guide was a product printed by The Bunting Publications, Inc in North Chicago and was offered out to different businesses for promotion, much like a business might get calendars, pens and magnets printed with their business name. The book itself is cheaply printed on newsprint with a cardstock cover and is held together with staples, so it would have been an economical purchase for a business, but also something that would have been used often in the household. Some copies pictured online have a blank space where the business name would go on the bottom of the cover. Could those copies be sample books sent out to prospective businesses?
I was united with my copy of A Modern Kitchen Guide at Highland Grounds coffee shop in Flesherton, Ontario, where there was a small shelf of second hand books for sale in the back and this cookbook was mine for some pocket change. My copy has some favourite recipes cut out of it, which I presume were added to a recipe box or scrapbook, but now I am very curious about these selected recipes!
Unfortunately for me, this is a rare instance when I can’t find a scanned copy of a cookbook online. I did find scans of the Cakes and Frostings section on the Antique Alter Ego blog, so I’ve been able to solve the mystery of the recipes missing from pages 167 & 168 (Fudge Frosting and Apple Filling).
If you have your own copy of A Modern Kitchen Guide and are willing to do some sleuthing for me, please get in touch. I’d love to know which recipes have been cut out of this book. Leave a comment as well with who sponsored your copy of the cookbook. I’m sure there were more distributed than what I’ve been able to find.
You’d think that I had really lucked out, since Apple Sauce Cake is in the one chapter I’ve found scanned online from this cookbook, but we’re not that fortunate. For some reason, pages 156 and 157 are missing from this blog post, but you can read the rest of the Cakes and Frostings Chapter on Antique Alter Ego.
Below: (left) The cover of my Farmer’s Advocate A Modern Kitchen Guide and (right) one of the pages that has been clipped. I’d love to find out what favourite recipe is below Peanut Brittle Dessert.
