The Church Lady Cookbook Dialogs: Sugar, Sugar, Ah Honey, Honey, You’ve Got Me Wanting You

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In 1975 I learned to bake during the sugar shortage. I was the most unlikely and reluctant candidate for the position of housewife that ever graced a kitchen. While I was figuring out the housewife/mother thing, the steepest learning curve I climbed was managing a meager food budget meant to feed 2 adults and one hungry infant. I learned to bake bread, as well as other sweets from scratch. I purchased flour in 25 lb. bags and doing the math for the cost of all the ingredients, figured that my loaves cost $0.25 a peice. I used my baking to take up time that stretched endlessly and to eat my way out of boredom. This shortage forced me to figure out how to substitute other types of sweeteners for refined white sugar if my comfort food of brownies, cookies and cake were going to measure up and get me through all the rest of this homemaker stuff.

The sugar shortage was caused by some shenanigans around sugar imports to the US, price fixing, and poor crop output. The price of refined sugar went from $0.85 a pound to $2.35 a pound. A nearly 200% increase. By this time Americans had become addicted to sugar, and we were consuming 100 lbs. per person per year, accounting for a large portion of our daily caloric intake.

Helpfully this shortage coincided with the eat-healthy-hippie era and dire warnings against letting kids eat too much sugar. It was claimed that too much sugar caused hyperactivity and other other disasters for our kids. Thankfully women’s magazine of the era were on it. I was able to find information about what to do about this sugar shortage and by default revel in the smug feeling of feeding my family a healthy diet rather than a poverty induced one. In these articles I found what I needed to know about how to do without sugar. These articles focused mostly on the harm of sugar rather than the chemistry of substitutions and I discovered that the balance between dry and wet ingredients was vital and flavors and textures changed as well. It pays to experiment with the recipe and prepare for a disaster or two.

Cooks and bakers during the depression and war years found these shortages and out of reach prices a deterrent was well and offered suggestions for substitutes. I found this list of sugar substitutes in my grandmother’s church lady cookbook by The Baxter Street Christian School of Grand Rapids, MI, and the Baxter Mutual Helpers Club, Squad 4, from January 1945. They offered the following list:

This list is still relevant for what ever reason sugar is not in your diet a good resource. Gramma knew what she was doing.

Because cakes are fussy things they are harder to substitute for, here are some recipes that are either low on refined sugar and more easily substituted or one that does not use refined sugar at all.

The recipes are from the kitchens of the good ladies at the Pine Rest Sanitarium and Christian Psychopathic Hospital Circles (date unknown, guessing the 1940’s). My grandmother, Mrs. Arthur Smitter, was a member of the Cutlerville Circle.

The Dutch Honey recipe, submitted by Mrs. C. Lenheer, calls for a 1/4 cup of refined sugar, but is mostly sweetened with brown sugar, honey and molasses. The refined sugar could be eliminated and the other sweeteners could be expanded maintaining the balance between wet and dry ingredients. If you try this recipe let me know how it turns out and what you substituted.

The oatmeal cake has no sugar and sounds yummy. Also all that oatmeal is good for your cholesterol so another good reason to try this one.

And no cake is complete without frosting. I will share this brown sugar frosting recipe:

The Church Lady Cookbook Dialogs: Eggs and Rising to the Occasion

I blame my cholesterol. Eggs have been out of my diet for a while so the egg shortage is something that has not affected my diet in any drastic way during this pandemic. But eggs offer more than comfort at breakfast. They are used in baking for making cakes and the like light and fluffy. A shortage of eggs is causing all kinds of distress for the stress baking crowd. I shared a recipe from a church lady cookbook that required only one egg that sounded tasty. I found one that needs no eggs and would like to share that as well.

The recipe is from the church lady cookbook compiled by The Baxter Street Christian School, Grand Rapids, MI, January 1945, and offered recipes from the thrifty minded church ladies during a time of shortages and tight budgets.

They proudly offered their traditional Dutch fare and included recipes that were handy to have when things, like eggs, were often not available or affordable.

Mrs. Sena Takens (May 30, 1900 – March 1985), the Chairman of Squad 4, of the Baxter Mutual Helpers Club offered this recipe for a cake that has no eggs. Notably it does not include refined sugar, another limited resource in this era, and is sweetened with raisins, brown sugar and other spices.

The leavening is achieved with baking powder and baking soda. Each are leavening agents with different chemical properties that are not often used together. According to the website healthline the page on the difference between baking soda and baking powder:

“While both products appear similar, they’re certainly not the same. Baking soda is sodium bicarbonate, which requires an acid and a liquid to become activated and help baked goods rise.
Conversely, baking powder includes sodium bicarbonate, as well as an acid. It only needs a liquid to become activated.”

Notice how each of these ingredients are prepared in this recipe in order to use each according to its specific chemical properties.

The Church Lady Cookbook Dialogs: Necessity

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I don’t cook. Its been some time since I had a family around sporting the what’s-for-dinner-look so I gave it up and was happy to see it go. It happened the day my daughter kicked me out of the kitchen when she was 10. She realized she was better at it than I, informed me that I would not be allowed back in the kitchen ever again and that was the end of that. I was relieved. I can cook, and for reasons that I won’t go into here, I’m just not really fond of it. The shocked look of astonishment my housemate gave me the other day when I was at the stove during this pandemic speaks volumes. It seemed unfathomable to him that I might actually know what to do in a kitchen. I was trying it again as a novelty created from necessity. It seems to be going good so far.

Even so, during those years when my cooking came to a halt I went through a period of collecting church-lady cookbooks. You know the ones, the ones that women’s groups put together to sell as fund raisers for churches, schools, hospitals, sanitariums and the like. They vary in quality, some are professionally printed, others are more a DIY project. My favorite one is typewritten, copied on colored construction paper and bound with three binder rings. Some sold advertising space from local businesses. Some of those ads during the war years reminded you to buy your war bonds now! so that you can later purchase your Wonder Range.

The recipes and the names of recipe donors reveal things about the lives and histories of the people who made them. They give clues that identify the immigrant history, as well as the current circumstances of the region by the kinds of recipes that they submitted. One of my grandmother’s from the era of WWII reflects the cooking and baking preferences of 1st and 2nd generation Dutch immigrant women during an era of shortages, rationing and tight budgets and includes: vetbollen (deep fried, like a doughnut), krentjebrij (the Dutch version of fruit soup), and boerenkool (a dish of potatoes, barley, kale and pig hock).

After reading about all the cooking and baking going on on social media I pulled these cookbooks out to learn (again) how to cook on a short supply with what I might have on my the kitchen shelves. How to use those beans, left overs, substitutes for sugar, butter and other things that may be in short supply in my cupboard.

The cookbook I first went to for guidance was compiled for the Baxter Christian School (Grand Rapids, MI) by the Mutual Helpers Club, Squad 4, January 1945.

The Mutual Helpers Club, Squad 4, included my grandmother, Mrs. Arthur Smitter, and seven other women whose recipes were in the book. They were supported by local businesses that purchased advertising space.

I was looking for some other inspiration from these women, but found this recipe that I will include here given the short supply of eggs these days. I have not tested this recipe, but it looks simple to do. Also, for those who do not know: Spry is a brand of vegetable shortening that was a competitor of Crisco. Its basically solid vegetable oil that was used in baking and cooking. For a traditional taste you can use Crisco, as Spry is no longer manufactured. But margarine or butter can be substituted if all that grease seems gross. Be aware that it will have a different taste and texture depending on what you use.

Here you are: One Egg Cake