Madeira Cake

I have always enjoyed baking and I was hopeful that dried egg would have a real use in baking. The ‘powdered egg’ meals really will have had to be reserved for desperate times. I still haven’t finished all of them, but I am taking a little break before I try the bacon and egg pie. However, baking must have been a challenge on rations. The principle key elements of cake making are fat, sugar and eggs all of which were rationed. This must have made cake making the reserve for special occasions, if at all. 

At first glance at the recommended recipe, I could tell this was not going to have the consistency of a ‘normal’ cake. Firstly, this was going to be a dense batter, due to the small amount of fat and sugar to flour ratio. Secondly, there was not a lot of moisture in the recipe. Using powdered eggs, means that you are losing quite a lot from the egg whites and due to the low fat content I could not picture how this would turn out. The recipe also calls for ‘National Flour.’

Nation Flour was the name given to the 85% extraction flour which was introduced in the UK in February 1941, it was later called wheatmeal flour and then production discontinued in 1956. Now, it took me a month to get hold of powdered egg, so finding ‘National Flour’ was probably not going to be an option, so I decided to go with all purpose.

I followed the recipe exactly, however the consistency was so thick that my poor mixer could have used the dough hook (this may be rationing, but I'm still using my modern appliances). To resolve this I went my own way and thinned down the consistency with milk. The baking time also seemed a little excessive of 1 ½ to 2 hours in a moderate oven? I only baked this for ½ an hour as I would with most sponges of this size in a 23 cm tin. If I had cooked this in a loaf tin, I would have increased this to 50 minutes but not much longer.

Once cooled, I chiselled out the Madeira cake from the tin and although it wasn’t the best cake I have ever made, it was not unpleasant at all. Due to the thickness of the mixture it pretty much tasted of scone (one big giant scone). However, cut into slices, you could quite happily eat this with Jam, butter or cream (like a scone) and it is so stodgy that it would keep you going for ever!   

'Egg Cutlet'

‘Egg Cutlet’

I spoke to my grandmother this weekend and asked her about the powdered egg ‘meals’ as they are not great. However, she did say that although they did use them, they didn’t eat them as per the recipes I am re-creating. Instead, they mainly used them in baking etc, which does make sense. She did tell me though how her mother used to preserved real eggs in isinglass, which is from the swimbladders of fish. Fresh eggs were placed in a bucket with water and isinglass which would keep them from going bad over winter. I wonder if there is anyone out there still doing this? Keeping eggs that little bit longer, is a really good idea.

The egg cutlet, consisted off powdered egg, mixed cook vegetables and oatmeal, formed into patties and fried. 

Mock Fried Egg

After a week at work where the last thing I was thinking about was food, due to extreme business and general stress, tonight it was ‘Mock Fried Egg.’ In our organic, anti-additives age the word ‘mock’ in any recipe or on any package would not be popular. However, this is rationing and the ministry of food was working with what they had. I need to ask my grandmothers if they actually made ‘mock fried egg’ or just went without. To be fair, this wasn’t that bad and just tasted like bread dipped in egg and fried.

Recipe:

Cut a hole in a slice of bread, (I used a pastry cutter), dip in water and fry on one side until golden brown. Reconstitute an egg (working out the lumps) and once the bread is brown, flip over and pour the egg into the hole. Once the other side of the bread has browned, flip back over briefly so the reconstituted egg cooks through.