During WWII in Vancouver, certain foods and drinks were rationed including butter, sugar, meat, eggs, tea, coffee and alcohol. Earlier this month I was privileged to check out some of the lovely wartime cookbooks deep in the basement of the Museum of Vancouver. Curator Joan Seidl introduced me to the lovely Edith Adams, the Vancouver Sun's locally grown version of Betty Crocker. We discovered a recipe for War Fruit Cake which will appear in the exhibition, along with a reproduction of the cover of Vitamins for Victory!: Edith Adams' 8th Annual Prize Winner's Cookbook with choice recipes from the Vancouver Sun. The fruit cake has no eggs, and it uses apple sauce for moisture and baking soda as a leavening agent. I asked my mom if they ate a lot of fruit cake in those days. "Oh yes," she said. "At weddings and Christmas and I used to get one for my birthday because it was so close to Christmas." I think she would have preferred chocolate.
There's a story about Vancouver fruitcakes that I'm going to talk about later (which involves a giant gourd grown in the Okanagan called the zucca) but in the mean time mom says she used to remember her dad growing citron melons in Saskatchewan for making candied peel to go in fruit cakes. And if you don't think fruit cakes are such a big deal, Canada consumed 3.3 million pounds of glacé fruits in 1943. That's a lot of fruit cake!
There is a recipe on the web from a Vancouver Bed and Breakfast called Arbutus Garden House for a World War II Cake that they used to make for their customers. "Is that why they're no longer in business?" Joan Seidl quipped. Well, I don't know but I think there is a bit of a fruit cake revival going on now that we no longer dump chemicals on the dried fruit and we don't load them with sugar and lard. I see slices of fruit cake as decadent "power bars." Bring on the fruitcake season, Edith!
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