The Vintage Reader

Was it the B-17 "Flying Fortress"? The bazooka? The atom bomb?

Well, okay, that last one wins hands-down. However, I maintain that number 2 should be a truly abominable homefront creation: War Cake (pictured at left). Honestly, you could lob a few loaves over the bow of an enemy submarine and the crew would surrender just to keep you from doing it again. Whole infantries would tremble before the prospect of eating this stuff for dinner. Or I suppose it could just be that mine didn't turn out right.

That must be the case, because I got the recipe from M.F.K. Fisher's How to Cook a Wolf, which is one of my favorite books of hers. Written in 1942, the year that rationing was instituted, it's about making do with less than you're used to. Besides advice on cooking, she also has some interesting things to say about dishwashing (basically: she doesn't do it. She scrapes the dishes off, then runs hot water over them. No soap. No dishwasher.), soapmaking, and home economy during war or peace. My edition is a reprint of the 1951 revision, wherein she makes a lot of bracketed comments about her state of mind in 1942. Usually I find later revisions of a classic pretty pointless and stupid (Han shot first, dammit), but in this case I kind of enjoy her caustic musings on her younger self.

Judging by the vast number of War Cake recipes that were out there (off the top of my head, I know I've got two different ones, and if you Google "war cake" you'll find a TON of them--even some modern ones from current war zones), it was obligatory to include a recipe for it in any WWII-era cookbook, and one like this that is specifically about making do would just have to have had one. An eggless, butterless, milkless cake: what better example of creative wartime cooking? But she includes it grudgingly, noting that it was one of her favorite things as a child during the first world war:

(I am sure that I could live happily forever without tasting it again. There are many things like that: you recall with astonishment and a kind of admiration some of the things eaten with sensual delight at eight or eighteen, that would be a gastronomical auto da fé for you at twenty-eight, or fifty. But that does not mean that you were wrong so long ago. War Cake says nothing to me now, but I know that it is an honest cake, and one loved by hungry children. And I'm not ashamed of having loved it... merely a little puzzled, and thankful that I am no longer eight.)

I remember some things like that too. Wonder Bread with white gravy, eaten with fried chicken and mashed potatoes at my grandparents' house for lunch. Red punch in tiny glasses at the Piccadilly Cafeteria. Otter Pops. Oh, and those weird little chalky caramel-flavored snack sticks that were supposedly eaten by the Apollo astronauts: I think they were called "Space Food." [Note: you can still buy these things!]

I am certain that even at the tender age of eight, M.F.K. Fisher would NEVER have eaten Space Food. And I have to admit that War Cake is probably a little bit better.