What we think of as the classic carrot cake recipe is relatively new. Adding raw carrots and oil to a cake isn’t a normal way to make a cake, but is does work. But carrot cake as a thing hasn’t evolved, as much as jumped systems.
How did we get here?
Talking about cake over dinner (as you do), we got to thinking about when carrots were first incorporated into a cake. The consensus around the dinner table was that it was likely a wartime1 thing. Carrots were a substitute for sugar in Britain2, to the extent that a carrot on a stick was a treat for children.
A quick look on Wikipedia suggested that this was only part of the answer. The earliest carrot cake recipe I can find is from the 16th century and was essentially a stuffed carrot.
A Booke of Cookrye, A.W. (1587)
This book, published in several editions in the late 16th century, contains the most disturbing cooking instruction I’ve ever read:
Take a red cock that is not too olde, and beate him to death, and when he is dead fley him and quarter him in small peeces, and bruse the bones everye one of them.
This is a recipe for a chicken dish to feed someone with consumption (tuberculosis). This is not chicken soup for the soul3.
Less dependant on extreme violence to poultry is the recipe for a pudding in a carrot:
To make a pudding in a Carret root.
Take your Carret root and scrape it fair, then take a fine knife and cut out all the meat that is within the roote, and make it hollow, then make your pudding stuffe of the liver of a gooce or of a Pig, with grated bread, Corance [currants], Cloves and mace, Dates, Pepper, Salt and Sugar, chop your Liver very small, and perboile it ere you chop it, so doon, put it in your hollow root. As for the broth, take mutton broth with corance, carets sliste, salt, whole Mace, sweet Butter, Vergious [sour grape juice] and grated bread, and so serve it forth upon sippets [toasted bread].
It’s a carrot stuffed with chopped liver with spices and currants, served with a sour bread-thickened broth on toast. They must have had much bigger carrots in the 16th century, I can’t see anyone fiddling about trying to stuff chopped liver into a modern carrot.
Antoine Beauvilliers (1754 – 1817)
I had a search for old recipe books and found that The Internet Archive has Volume 1 of Beauvilliers’ L’ Art de Cuisinier in French and the full text translation into English from 1827. Beauvilliers’ recipe is in volume 2, so I used the English translation4. As shown below, it’s somewhat lacking in detail and, like the book itself, designed for mass catering.
There is no oil in this recipe. It requires a total of twelve eggs (four whole, six separated and a further two in the cream pâtissière). This is a baked, starch stabilised custard rather than what we would think of as a cake. The closest thing available now are baked custards such as the French far Breton and tarte aux fruits, Portuguese pastel de nata, and British custard tarts 5. These don’t have the added whipped egg whites and so are denser than Beauvilliers’ carrot cake. But, since a cake is a solid mass of anything, it’s still a cake.
Carrot cake, butter cake style
For a more cake-like cake, we look at old recipes such as the one below. This is from a 1981 article in the Washington Post. It’s not clear when it originated, but the author said it was four or five generations old, so maybe 1900-1910. This is a cake with butter as the fat and really looks like a cake we would make today. Although I doubt we would start preparation two days in advance and soak sultanas in brandy overnight. This is a boiled cake, in which the fruit is rehydrated by gently boiling in a syrup. See my recipe for more details.
Early modern oil cakes
Further searching revealed a 1929 recipe that uses oil. This was the product of at least two innovations over the previous 100 years. First, the availability and acceptance of sodium bicarbonate as a leavening agent for domestic use6. Second, bland vegetable oils became more readily available and so the use of oil rather than solid fats became possible.
It took a while for the UK to start making carrot cakes with oil. A 1943 British recipe is similar to Ethel Amsler’s, using 3 oz of precious sugar and 4 oz carrots. There is no spice or nuts in the wartime recipe; such things were likely hard to come by.
I have made this, and the results were good. It came out as a pleasant, slightly crumbly cake that lasted about two days before all of it was eaten.
Modern carrot cake
I also made a carrot cake using a modern, oil based, recipe. The result was a success, by which I mean it all went very quickly before I could take a good photo of the inside. I will have to make another; luckily, it’s the favourite cake of one of our children so I won’t get any complaints.
The texture contrasts markedly with the World War II cake recipe. It’s softer and less crumbly than the butter cake. I only did one layer – in the recipe you can double all quantities and sandwich the layers with cream cheese icing.
Jumping systems; cake taxonomy
We can divide cake into several systems (up to 11, depending on who you ask), divided by the aeration method, number of eggs, use of flour, type of fat and leavening method. In this approach, carrot cake started as a baked custard, moved into a butter cake before finishing as an oil cake.
What all this means is that as long as a baked batter has sugar in, it’s a cake. Add carrot, and you’ve got carrot cake. The rest is fiddly little details.
- By which we mean World War 2 (1939-1945). ↩︎
- Sugar was rationed to 8 oz (225 g) per adult per week. ↩︎
- There is a Japanese belief that minimal stress contributes to better-tasting meat. This is the opposite of that. ↩︎
- This is true, and it’s not because my French isn’t up to reading a 200 year old recipe. Oh no. ↩︎
- One of my father-in-law’s favourites. ↩︎
- This is referred to as ‘chemical leavening’, in contrast to yeast or aeration by whipping. Some way of getting air in is necessary for a light cake. ↩︎
