The world assumed by most modern recipes is a place of wild abundance. In this universe, pantry shelves are laden with specialty bread flour, agave syrup, extra-large eggs, exotic fruits, and as much grass-fed beef as your credit card can handle.
It's all available, anything you can dream of; if you were to bake six-egg chocolate cakes every day for the rest of your life, well, you're allowed. But this land of milk and honey in most cookbooks is a mirage, or at least an incomplete version of reality.
Food is scarce for many people now and has been for many people all throughout human history. And when necessity prompts invention, cooks have come up with some fascinating, delicious replacements.
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Take, for example, the wacky cake. While its origins do not appear to have been the subject of scholarly study yet, folklore holds it to be a recipe from the first half of the 20th Century, cooked up during the hardship of the Great Depression or the world wars.
The cake lacks butter, milk, and – crucially, since they help give the batter structure – eggs, yet rises like a dream. The recipe usually calls, somewhat eccentrically, for the dry ingredients to be combined in the baking tin, while liquid ingredients are poured into three small wells poked into the flour. Then the whole mess is swiftly whisked together and put into a hot oven.
The secret to the wacky cake, which is mostly flour, sugar, and vegetable oil, is the inclusion of baking soda and vinegar. When the two meet in a thousand little nooks and crannies in the wet batter, their explosive reaction leads the cake to rise.
Laura Shapiro, a cake historian, points out that this ingenious trick didn't necessarily have to wait for the wars to come into use: “I have a feeling (no evidence whatever) that it goes back way further,” she remarks. “It just seems like one of those tricks women figured out at some point when they had no eggs around.”
Wacky cake is moist, tasty, and, to most palates, not all that different from a cake with all the usual parts. But other substitutions, especially those come up with for reasons of rationing and national self-reliance, are a little more obvious.
Take for example the “mock goose” that crops up in a number of World War II rationing recipes. A dish vaguely recalling certain aspects of a roast goose – notably, the fact that there is stuffing involved – has been around for hundreds of years in English-language cookbooks; Hannah Glasse, author of the 1747 book The Art of Cooking, Made Plain and Easy, describes a “mock goose” that consists of a stuffed pork knuckle.
By the 1940s, the term ‘mock goose’ sat atop rationing recipes involving sliced potatoes and apples baked with sage
But by 1897, a recipe in the Hull Daily Mail shows it had become layers of sausage meat interspersed with mashed potatoes, and by the 1940s, the already-tenuous connection between inspiration and reality had shattered, as the term now sat atop rationing recipes involving sliced potatoes and apples baked with sage.
The intent may have been to make a savoury main dish that would stand on its own without having to use meat, but why bring goose into it? (In Chinese cuisine, mock goose or duck made from thin sheets of tofu wrapped around a vegetarian filling is a slightly more convincing Buddhist substitute – and a version made from chunks of textured wheat gluten, even more so.)
In German-occupied Athens during World War Two, things were even more dire. In 2011, Greek historian Eleni Nikolaidou published a very popular book called Starvation Recipes, drawing from self-help survival guides that appeared in Greek newspapers of that time, when people were indeed starving.
These recipes were sometimes no more than tips like chewing more slowly to make yourself feel full and making sure to sweep any leftover breadcrumbs off the table into a cup to save up and eat later, so as to have just a few more calories. One true “starvation recipe” Nikolaidou shared with The Guardian when her book was published was for meatballs with no meat, made instead with bulghur wheat, onion, and spices, with egg to bind it all together, or gelatin if there was no egg to be had.
Coverage of her book often references austerity policies in modern Greece, though most people's diets today, luckily, are not anywhere near as austere they were then.
Sometimes, a recipe that becomes popular during lean times sticks around – if it happens to be easy on the wallet, so much the better. Carrot cake, to take a prominent example, was not invented during wartime. But in the UK it was promoted by the Ministry of Food during the Second World War, since it used an unrationed vegetable: recipes for carrot cakes and even carrot Christmas pudding were published by the government, encouraging people to go easy on the sugar. Whether or not you truly rely on carrots' natural sweetness today, or add a hefty helping of sugar to a carrot cake, is up to you. But it's intriguing to remember that not so very long ago, people had a work-around that kept dessert on the table.
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