Billy Goat Date Cakes

Recipes for Billy Goat Cakes appeared in “old cookbooks” in all three of the Pacific states, according to Helen Brown, but she can explain neither name nor origin. From their ingredients of spices, raisins and nuts, brown sugar and molasses, they appear to be an evolutionary stepchild of the seventeenth-century English spiced cakes called “jumbles.” Jumbles, in turn, begat hermits, familiar to many an American child of the late nineteenth century from recipes such as one in