1915 Black Pepper Cake Welcome Friends! Welcome back to Sunday morning and another one of our old cookbook shows. Today we’re going to do another recipe out of the Five Roses
cookbook put out by the Lake of the Woods milling company and we’re going to try something today called Pepper Cake Recipe. It uses black pepper as one of the flavourings, something you don’t often see in cakes.
Ingredients:
250 mL (1 cup) raisins
250 mL (1 cup) Baking Syrup (sub corn syrup)
2 eggs
125 mL (½ cup) butter
125 mL (½ cup) sour cream
125 mL (½ cup) sugar
500 mL (2 cups) all purpose flour
5 mL (1 tsp) baking soda
5 mL (1 tsp) cinnamon
Nutmeg
5 mL (1 tsp) black pepper
Method:
Pre heat oven to 180ºC (350ºF)
Cream together the butter and sugar.
Beat in eggs one at a time.
Beat in baking syrup and sour cream.
In a separate bowl combine the dry ingredients.
Slowly mix the ‘dry’ ingredients into the ‘wet’.
Bake in a 9×9” cake pan for about 40 minutes.
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42 Comments
LOL! That wasn't enough pepper you put in to call it "Pepper Cake".
You blew it by telling her there was pepper in it. You should have let her taste it, and taste it some more, and guess.
I always thought black pepper ice cream would be interesting.
Glen, have you ever made a Cornstarch Cake from the Five Roses Bread & Pastry book?. I am morbidly curious how it would turn out.
Christmas cookies in human shape are called Pfefferkuchen. So suppose old German cookies had Pfeffer in gern them
there is always chocolate with chilly peppers
I believe the practice ultimately comes from India. A chai masala (or chai tea) is flavored with pepper corns, in addition to its many other spices. But considering that Europe nobles in the middle-ages traded with India and spiced their food more or less like Indians do OR else during the English rule over India later, it seems plausible that this translated into UK culture and then into Canadian culture.
Want to be surprised? Try sprinkling Black Pepper on Watermelon…
I have had a pepper soda before and I thought it was great.
There is an Italian-American recipe for "pepper biscuits" (they are actually black pepper & fennel seed cookies) that is popular on the East Coast of the US. My friend, who is Sicilian, has made them in her Rhode Island home for years. She shared her recipe with me & they are so delicious that I have been making them for about 5 years now.
I came here after being on one of the pop up sites, 40 strange foods people really ate in the 18th century. They claimed at the time having pepper was a sign of affluence so it was incorporated into many foods one would not think of theses days.
Maybe you can do a recipe for making your own Golden Syrup?
One of my favorite cookie recipes is the Black Pepper Cut-outs from The Spice Cookbook (Avenelle Day, Lillie Stuckey, Jo Spier). I’m definitely going to try this one!
Hi Glenn I personally love spicy cake, I'm looking forward to making this recipe.
I’ve never heard of the syrup in this recipe and would like to know more. Also, what is an invert sugar?
There’s a West Indian dessert called Pone that is a cake with black pepper
Knew of this cake in Northeast Ohio. Also sometimes added to gingerbread.
Some old gingerbread recipes call for some pepper. Really good.
I put black pepper in my molasses cookies but it was not in my original receipe.
I put cyanne pepper(just a dash or two) in my chocolate chip cookies, ne day kiddo made her own,. She said, they don't taste right, that's when I told her my secret ingerent.
There’s a German cookie recipe that contains pepper called pfeffer nusse
I always boil my raisins for a couple minutes before adding them, flavorful and moist
Black pepper, nutmeg, and raisins? I don't know, Glen. Sounds kind of weird, not gonna lie.
I used to put black pepper on my pancakes as a child. And it was delicious.🥞
My mom had an old cookbook in upstate NY that had a black pepper cookie recipe. It was really good. I see a lot of people’s comments about pfeffernusse cookies, but if you see a recipe from your area or New England for a cookie with pepper, would you try it please? Thank you so much!
I wonder if cane syrup could be used in place of the baker's syrup. It has a similar color.
Looks terrific
Pfeffernusse cookies have a 1/4 teaspoon of black pepper in it.
I always put a fair amount of pepper in my masala chai, as it really seems to awaken the other spices on the back of my tongue. Same idea here, I reckon.
I little bit late on this, but my grandma makes these pepper cookies. A chocolate and black pepper cookie with on orange glaze on top. They may be one of my favorite cookies out there
Never run across pepper in a cake, but my mom used to make Pfeffernusse cookies when I was a kid. Similar idea.
https://www.allrecipes.com/recipe/155182/pfeffernusse-cookies/
There was a really amazing blue corn snake heard it all that had it cracked pepper on the top of it that I had the other day in a restaurant here in Austin and I can totally see how black pepper would work with other sweets!
The Scottish Christmas cake called "black bun". Not only does it have pepper in it, but is also wrapped in pastry a bit odd, but tastes nice.
The Swedish cookie ( windmills) have pepper too.
Pfeffernusse Cookies
There is a type of cookie called "pfieffernusen". It's usually served with tea or coffee. It also uses black pepper as seasoning.
Expect that most 1915 stoves did not have temperature gauges on them. Most would have been wood stoves.
Pepper cake sounds really good. I put fresh ground black pepper on most everything. It's a good antioxidant.
My go-to chocolate cookie recipe uses black pepper (and maybe a little cayenne if I remember correctly. It was a Chef John recipe after all). Most people I've subjected them to love them, a few are horrified when I tell them there is black pepper in them but those tend to be people who don't like to do things outside of their comfort zone or tradition.
My nonna (Italian grandmother) puts black pepper in her biscotti.
Family molasses ginger cookie recipe uses black pepper.
I haven’t had black pepper in a cake before, but my mother used to make a German cookie recipe at Christmas called Pfefferneuse that contained black pepper. The recipe said to store them for about 6 weeks before eating, which supposedly enabled the pepper to loose some of its bite and lent a more mild pepper flavor to the cookie.
I wanted to make this last night but had no corn syrup on hand, and also only had one egg and dates instead of raisins. I added 1/4 cup of brown sugar to the white sugar and added extra yogurt (no sour cream either) and a bit of milk to get consistency right. I ground the black pepper fresh in a mortar and used 1Tbsp of black peppercorns. Phenomenal cake, will be adding a healthy dose of fresh ground black pepper to my christmas cakes in the future. Cheers from the east coast Glen!