The Twentieth-Century Cake Recipe Industry

The new century was very different from the old, and so were its cakes. Notwithstanding the terrible years of the Great Depression, the material and technological circumstances of middle-class Americans greatly improved, and cake-baking, as a result, became more accessible to greater numbers of people. Middle-class homes had larger, more convenient kitchens, equipped with gas and electric stoves, whose thermostatically controlled ovens made cake-baking much easier and surer-fire than it had been for their Victorian mothers and grandmothers, contending with coal- and wood-fired ranges. The middle class, in addition, had greater income at its disposal to purchase cake-baking materials, not only the butter and eggs, whose expense harried their nineteenth-century forebears, but also nuts, coconut, dried fruits, candied fruits, extracts, fresh lemons and oranges, chocolate, and rich dairy products such as cream, sour cream, and cream cheese. Meanwhile, all of these products were cheaper in absolute terms as well as more widely and conveniently available in an ever-expanding range of choices. Not everyone could afford all of these products all of the time, to be sure, but even hard-pressed housewives found cake-baking feasible, for innumerable inexpensive convenience products, like vegetable shortening, evaporated milk, sweetened condensed milk, and imitation extracts appeared on the market. Meanwhile, flour and sugar, the basic building blocks of cakes, had become so cheap as to be affordable in any quantity by everyone.