The electoral cake was the means used by colonial women to influence male voters.
From time to time, I want to do something I call “sports cooking”. I find some sort of complex recipe, or something that develops my skills and piques my curiosity.
This is what happened when I was looking for something to celebrate my 100th newsletter issue. Yes, it’s true. That’s 100. If you lit all those candles on a cake, you’d probably burn your house down. So don’t try this at home.
But in my search for something worthy, I came across what me and my boss, Melissa Lee, (a fellow foodie) considered a fascinating project. This is what we call the electoral cake. The story, perhaps apocryphal, is that women, who could not vote in the 18th and 19th centuries, baked these cakes to attract the attention of male voters and try to get them to vote for their (women’s) issues. and their candidates – nice. as the precursor to a Super PAC.
I love this story and I sincerely hope it is true. On top of that, when I found it, I was trying to find a recipe for my 100th issue. I didn’t think I’d find a recipe that I knew was at least 100 years old, let alone make one, but I was corrected by Lee, who, during a Teams video chat, left for a moment and was returned, carrying a very old version of a recipe book by Fanny Farmer.
She found it online under the title “The Boston Cooking School Cookbook.” and sent me a link. The problem was that there weren’t many details, with instructions like “Cook for one hour in a slow oven.” I understand that they probably didn’t have a digital temperature control, but I wasn’t going to go to the trouble of going through this recipe and messing it up when it came time to cook.
Fortunately, 21st century cooks have more knowledge than I do. I tried an election cake recipe I found on Reddit, but it didn’t work for me. The problem was that you prepared the bread dough and the dough separately and then combined them. My problem was that I couldn’t get the sourdough bread dough to mix properly with the dough, so I had three loaf pans full of mostly quick bread with bread stains that were basically inedible.
Enter the New York Times Cooking website, which has a version where you combine all the ingredients in a particular order so that the bread dough and dough are mixed from the start. The result is perfect and the lemon icing complements the cake perfectly.
In the 1700s, women probably didn’t use a Bundt pan, but regular loaf pans. Did they just shape the dough on a baking sheet and bake it over an open fire? I don’t know, but I do know this: the recipe is a half-day project, with all the rising and baking, and I made a horrible mess in my kitchen building it. But the end result was worth the honor of my 100th column/newsletter/blog/whatever, I’ve been doodling every week for almost two years.
If you like the idea of sports cooking, try this recipe. If not, we could at least all learn from the ingenuity of colonial women and remember that recipes are living things. They change, grow and improve while they have the opportunity, just like us.
Thank you, readers, for sticking with me through all this trouble, and please ask your friends to sign up. We are all better together.
Find the recipe on this link. If this doesn’t suit you, send me an email and I’ll send it to you. In the meantime, here are 100 more of these little doodles.
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