During the next week, our nation will celebrate two anniversaries of note.
Friday, Aug. 14, is the 75th anniversary of V-J Day, the day on which Japan surrendered to the Allies and ended World War II. Tuesday, Aug. 18, marks the centenary of the ratification of the 19th Amendment to the Constitution, which gave American women the right to vote.
One could celebrate these occasions in any number of ways. I choose to bake.
V-J Day was a huge event in our country. About 2 million people gathered in downtown Manhattan that evening. They filled Times Square — waving flags, dancing and shrieking with joy.
Locally, as I learned from perusing the archives at the Greenfield Recorder (then called the Greenfield Recorder-Gazette), parades and celebrations took place in larger communities like Greenfield and Turners Falls. Smaller towns like Heath held prayer services.
Businesses like Wilson’s department store and the Army & Navy Store in Greenfield took out special ads in the newspaper commemorating the occasion. Editorials discussed upcoming changes in employment in the area and reminded readers of the sacrifices of those who had served in the war.
In a sense, just about everybody served in the war. People on the home front blacked out their homes at night with special curtains and manned observation posts to report on airplanes flying overhead.
In my own hometown of Hawley, Elvira Bellows Scott recalls taking on six-hour shifts at the post behind the East Hawley Church when she was a teenager. “I wasn’t afraid of the dark,” she told me.
Above all, every citizen had to observe rationing. Gasoline, tires and a number of foods were rationed.
The vintage recipe I offer below is for Wacky Cake. This concoction first saw the light of day (or rather the light of oven) during World War I. It was highly popular in the second great war because it did without three regular cake ingredients that were rationed: eggs, butter and milk.
To celebrate women’s suffrage, I include a recipe associated not with a purely local person (although I do suggest that readers revisit the excellent coverage last month in this paper of local suffrage efforts) but with someone who is associated with women’s suffrage in general.
Born near Adams, Susan B. Anthony co-founded the National Woman Suffrage Association. She lectured and wrote extensively on the subject of the vote for women and actually cast a vote in 1872, although she was arrested and tried for violating the law.
She responded to her sentence with an eloquent speech in which she said, “It was ‘we, the people,’ not ‘we the white male citizens’; nor yet ‘we, the male citizens’; but ‘we, the whole people,’ who formed the union.”
Anthony died 14 years before women achieved the right to vote. She is nonetheless remembered as a pioneer in that effort and as a remarkable person, both an indefatigable warrior and the beloved “Aunt Susan” of younger feminists.
Just before her death in 1906, she gave her final speech. It ended with the rallying cry, “Failure is impossible.”
To figure out how to pay culinary tribute to Anthony, I called the Susan B. Anthony House in Rochester, N.Y., a while back and asked whether the people who worked there had any idea what she liked to eat.
To my delight, I was informed that they had just been discussing this topic. A staff member generously sent me the text of a letter draft from 1898 in which Anthony was responding to a group of college juniors who wanted the recipe for her favorite cake.
The letter didn’t actually include the recipe, just sort of described it. The recipe below is my interpretation of Anthony’s description.
I hope readers enjoy these two very different cakes — and take time to celebrate this week’s two milestones in American history.
1 to ¼ cups flour
1 cup sugar
¼ cup cocoa
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoon vanilla
1 tablespoon vinegar (cider or white distilled)
⅓ cup canola oil (or other type of neutral oil)
1 cup water
Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Grease and flour an 8-inch-square cake pan.
In a bowl combine the flour, the sugar, the cocoa, the salt and the baking soda.
Make three wells in the combined dry ingredients. Pour the vanilla into one, the vinegar into the second and the oil into the third. Pour the water over everything and stir with a wooden spoon until the dry ingredients are wet and everything is thoroughly combined.
Pour the batter into the prepared cake pan. Bake the cake until a toothpick inserted into the center comes out clean (about 25 to 30 minutes).
Eat as is or frost as desired. Serves eight to 10 people.
5 eggs at room temperature
½ teaspoon almond or vanilla extract
1 cup sugar
1 pinch salt
1 cup flour
Raspberry jam or sauce or plain raspberries for garnish (optional)
Whipped cream for garnish (optional)
Preheat the oven to 325 degrees. Cut a piece of wax paper to fit the bottom of a 9-inch tube pan.
In a medium mixing bowl, beat together the egg yolks and the extract until they lighten. Gradually beat in half of the sugar.
Wash your beaters thoroughly. Beat the egg whites and the salt until they form soft peaks. Gently and gradually beat in the remaining sugar. When the peaks are glossy and beginning to stiffen, remove the beaters from the bowl.
Fold a quarter of the egg whites into the egg yolk mixture. Pour the remaining egg whites on top, and sift the flour on top of them. Gently fold the flour and the egg whites into the batter.
Delicately pour the batter into the prepared pan. Bake the cake until it is a golden brown and a toothpick inserted into the center comes out clean, about 35 minutes.
Invert the cake over a cooling rack and let it cool completely before coaxing the cake out of the pan. This will probably involve running a knife delicately around the sides of the pan and the tube. Peel off the wax paper.
Gingerly break off pieces of the cake. Serve with or without fruit and whipped cream. (With is better.) Serves 10 people.
Tinky Weisblat is the award-winning author of “The Pudding Hollow Cookbook,” “Pulling Taffy” and “Love, Laughter, and Rhubarb.” Visit her website, tinkycooks.com.