Carrot cake is one of my favorite cakes,
and while desserts with carrots have been around for centuries carrot cake as we know it
didn't really take off until World War II
when carrots could be eaten as a way to replace sugar and to help your eyesight or
at least that's what my nana told me.
So today I'm making this ration friendly carrot cake using a recipe from World War II.
Carrot cake this time on Tasting History.
So if you are watching this on posting day you'll probably notice it is a Thursday,
and I usually don't post on Thursdays but today is kind of special because
it's my birthday and not just any birthday
it's my 40th birthday which is a pretty big one,
and so for my big 40th birthday I asked for a carrot cake,
a modern carrot cake, a delicious multi-tiered carrot cake with cream cheese frosting.
But that's not what we're making today. Today I'm making a not so modern carrot cake,
a carrot cake from before the time that carrot cake and cream cheese frosting ever met,
a time before the 1960s. So I figured I would go back to when carrot cake became extremely popular.
Now it wasn't invented during World War II but it did become very popular during World War II
because it was ration friendly. You could use the carrots
to sweeten the cake in place of sugar which was being rationed.
Depending on where you were, and at what point in the war you were
the typical sugar ration in England and the US was eight ounces per week for an adult
but when you're baking a cake eight ounces of sugar really is not very much
hence the introduction of the carrots.
So I'm going to be working from a ration friendly carrot cake recipe from 1943 from England
which calls for 1 3/8 cup or 170 grams of flour, one teaspoon of baking powder,
a little over 1/3 cup or 70 grams of solid cooking fat like Crisco.
Fat at the time was used in the manufacture of explosives so it was very precious to the war cause,
and so the average weekly ration for an adult was only four ounces, and since this uses three ounces
this is not an everyday cake.
One heaping cup or 90 grams of oatmeal, three tablespoons of raw grated carrot.
So it really doesn't seem like very much carrot for a carrot cake.
Today you would probably add like three cups of shredded carrots so
like 16 times as much carrot but we'll blame it on the war.
One and a half tablespoons or 20 grams of sugar, one dried egg reconstituted.
Now the ration for eggs was one egg per week. One fresh egg per person per week.
So they use these dried eggs a lot and would just add water and you can still get them today
often like camping stores, that's where I got mine.
Hm yeah, curious how that's gonna work.
Two and a half teaspoons of syrup.
And this would have been Lyle's golden syrup not maple syrup and they taste very, very different
so I'll put a link in the description to where you can get that.
And about 3/4 of a cup of water you'll know exactly how much water you need to add once you get to that stage.
So the recipe says
"Rub fat into flour, add dry ingredients and carrots and mix thoroughly.
Add the syrup, reconstituted egg, and sufficient water to form a fairly stiff consistency.
Place in a greased tin and bake in a moderate oven for 1 hour."
Super simple which is exactly what you want when you're making your own birthday cake.
Though I am curious what it's going to taste like seeing as there are no spices which are usually added to carrot cake today.
It doesn't even mention any salt but in a lot of old recipes they don't mention salt
even though we know that they did add salt so I'm going to take the liberty and add a half teaspoon of salt,
and then I'm going to whisk in the baking powder to the flour.
Then rub the fat into the flour and add in the oatmeal, and sugar, and the carrots, and whisk everything together.
Then pour in that reconstituted egg, and the syrup and stir everything together.
Then add some water, just a little at a time until you have a smooth but stiff batter.
Then pour it into a tin lined with parchment
and set it in the oven at 350 degrees Fahrenheit or 176 Celsius for 35 to 40 minutes.
The recipe says for an hour and maybe they were baking at a lower temperature,
or maybe just the ovens were different, they definitely were. An hour is too much, 35 to 40 minutes.
Now as this is kind of a special episode, my birthday episode, I actually hadn't planned on doing any history
because that's the hardest part of making any episodes so I was just going to do you know the historical dish but
I couldn't help myself so here's some background on carrot cake and carrots during World War II.
So the history of carrot cake starts not with carrot cake but with carrot pudding.
There is a 10th century recipe from Baghdad for T'khabis al-jazar,
and it calls for mashed carrots and honey to be fried in a pan with pistachio oil,
and then spread on a copper platter to cool into somewhat cross between a pudding and a very soft cake.
In Medieval Europe the pudding starts to take on more of the flavors that we would associate with carrot cake
like nutmeg, cream, and eggs
that were then mixed with carrots and ground up bread and then baked.
Still nowhere near as firm as a cake but we're getting closer.
In 1747 Hannah Glasse takes a detour in her recipe that I wouldn't mind revisiting
when she adds wine to the recipe.
And then in 1814 Antoine Beauvilliers a former Chef to Louis XVI
published a recipe for 'gateau de carotte' which he later translated into English as carrot cake.
Then this being the 19th century many Victorian Cooks took his recipe and
almost word for word put it into their cookbooks passing it off as their own.
It was made with pastry cream, orange blossom water, butter, and eggs along with a good amount of sugar,
and while it really sounds delicious it's still not really a cake.
It's more of a pie. It's kind of like the filling of a pumpkin pie
delicious but not able to stand on its own like you would expect from a cake.
And even through the early 20th century most of the carrot cakes are really carrot pies.
It's not until the late 1930s that true carrot cake as we know it today was born.
One recipe from New York in 1939 from 'Prudence Penny's Cookbook'
finally adds enough flour to the recipe to let this carrot cake be considered a cake.
Though it was the English that gave us the idea that carrot cake is actually a health food.
Growing up my nana always told me that eating carrots would improve my eyesight,
and I believe that until very, very recently
but it turns out that both my nana and I were just taken in by British wartime propaganda.
It's not the first time it's happened, it probably won't be the last.
See when Nazi Germany unleashed their luftwaffe on the cities of Britain in a campaign known as 'The Blitz'
those cities responded by having full blackouts making it more difficult for the Germans to see their targets.
That's a good thing but it also made it hard for these civilians to see where they were going especially when driving and so
in the first month alone there were over 1100 road deaths.
That's a bad thing.
So along with discouraging nighttime driving in December of 1940
the British Ministry of Agriculture began a campaign aimed at getting people to eat carrots.
"If we included a sufficient quantity of carrots in our diet,
we should overcome the fairly prevalent malady of blackout blindness."
Now whether the ministry actually believed that or not I don't know
but what they did know was that they were having a major food shortage across the country
but there were a few foods that were in surplus one of those being carrots.
Also people could grow carrots in their own gardens
so why not have people just eat more carrots but they took it to kind of a ridiculous level.
The New York Times said of Lord Woolton a proponent of rationing and carrots
"To hear him talk they contain enough vitamin A to make moles see in a coal mine."
Posters touting the health benefits of carrots began popping up all over Britain
often with the mascot, Doctor Carrot was a top hat wearing doctor who just happened to be a carrot
and was considered the children's best friend.
And while he had competition from Potato Pete who not only could make up a good stew
but seemingly was at once a Field Marshal and was capable of paratrooping into northern France to fight the Nazis himself
it was Doctor Carrot who won the day because potatoes can't help you see in the dark.
It also helped that Lord Bolton got Walt Disney to have one of his animators
make a family for Doctor Carrot.
Carroty George, Pop Carrot and Clara Carrot.
There was an added benefit to this eyesight boosting carrot theory,
and that was to hide the top secret system that allowed Royal Air Force pilots
to see approaching German bombers even in the black of night.
It was called radar and nobody knew about it so to keep it secret
they would tell the British Press
that it was all due to carrots and bilberry tea, both magic eyesight improving foods that they gave to their pilots.
Now whether the theory ever actually got back to the Germans...
I don't know. What I do know
is that it led to carrots becoming more popular than ever
and it led to a lot of new carrot recipes including the popularization of carrot cake.
So once your cake is baked take it out of the oven and let it cool completely,
and then it's ready to serve though if you were willing to go on to the black market,
and get some cream then you could whip yourself up some whipped cream just to make it a little bit of a prettier cake
which is what I did.
And here we are ration friendly carrot cake from World War II.
So it has a hue of orange in it but
it doesn't look like carrot cake as we know it really.
And it's definitely denser which is to be expected but smells good.
So here we go.
[Birthday chomp]
0_o
So it's moister than I'd expected and it actually tastes...
good.
But doesn't taste like carrots.
At the very, very end maybe I could see that this cake was once introduced to a carrot
but that's about it.
And I don't get why they wouldn't add more carrots. They were plentifu.
They would really help the flavor, they would help sweeten it up.
Yeah it's not bad but
I'm definitely going with a modern carrot cake for my birthday.
And if you want to learn a little bit more about the history of birthday cakes
one of my very first videos when I first started the channel back in 2020 was on birthday cakes
when I made myself again a birthday cake
so I'll put a link there and I will see you next time
on Tasting History when I will be totally in my 40s.
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