
Pork Cake Recipe Discovered at the Internet Archive - MilnerRoute
https://www.pigdog.org/auto/Dining/link/3175.html
======
PostOnce
Go browse [https://www.archive.org](https://www.archive.org) \-- you won't
regret it.

There's no telling what you'll find, in all languages, from all eras, from
magazines to music to movies to games to books, maps, ephemera, junk mail.

Ted Nelson kept all his junk mail, for some reason, and now it's fascinating.
Old computer product ads from the 60s and 70s, well before personal computing
was really a thing. Everything changed, from the nature of the products to the
nature of the ads.

[https://archive.org/details/tednelsonjunkmail](https://archive.org/details/tednelsonjunkmail)

see also: old issues of Next Generation magazine (half serious tech, half
gamer bro, I love both sides of it)

Byte Magazine; Japanese MSX magazines. Old cookbooks. Wargaming magazines. Old
books in general on everything from how to write shorthand to ... whatever you
want.

Archive.org and Wikipedia are the two best places to get lost on the internet.

~~~
coroxout
"Ted Nelson kept all his junk mail, for some reason"

I'm glad he did, I love the design on a lot of these!

Reminds me of the story of the John Johnson collection of "printed ephemera"
at a library in my town:
[https://www.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/johnson/about](https://www.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/johnson/about)

The way I've heard it, he was in Egypt studying the writing on papyrus
fragments which had been excavated from a seam of ancient landfill, and he
reflected on how much he'd learned about the real day-to-day lives of ancient
Egypt from what had been thrown away as scrap paper millennia before, and
wondered what people were doing in our age to preserve the modern-day
equivalents.

(Or modern-day-ish - this was the 1920s)

I love archive.org and have "lost" many an evening flicking through some
early-80s computer magazines or consumer electronics catalogues.

------
benj111
Mincemeat (as in mince pies) originally contained meat, the separation of
sweet and meat is fairly recent.

Reading the recipe, this doesn't seem to be in that vein, the recipe calls for
"fat salt pork" I wonder if that's just pork fat, and its more for the fat
content than anything else.

Edit: The linked recipe book is really quite interesting.

Why egg shells in coffee though??

~~~
trepanne
> Reading the recipe, this doesn't seem to be in that vein, the recipe calls
> for "fat salt pork" I wonder if that's just pork fat, and its more for the
> fat content than anything else.

Pretty much. This is closer to frontier cooking; the only source of shortening
and seasoning is from salt pork rendered (briefly) in boiling water. All the
ingredients have long shelf lives without refrigeration, except the eggs,
which would be available fresh.

Salt pork is generally belly fat - what's left when you take the bacon - low
proportion of lean meat. This cake is going to be pretty porky, so it's cut
with healthy doses of game-type spices... mace & cloves... all that cinammon
sounds gross though. I'd probably swap it out for fennel or star anise, or
just ditch the whole spice bill & go for Chinese five-spice powder instead.
Looks like it would probably benefit from an extra egg yolk or two, as well.

> Why egg shells in coffee though??

That's an old cowboy trick. Boiled or percolated coffee is pretty nasty, and
extracts a lot of extra acid from the grounds compared to drip. Egg shells
(CaCO3) are alkaline, and help neutralize the gut churn.

------
ThrowawayR2
I don't get the mockery. There's nothing wrong with sweet and salty
combinations of foods. Are maple bacon donuts & cupcakes uncommon outside of
the US west coast?

~~~
vestibule
You should try following the recipe and report back on how delicious the
result was. I read it and it sounds like you'd get a lumpy mess if you tried
to make it -- not something similar to a maple bacon donut.

------
sftwds
The linked cookbook doesn’t have any oven temperatures, which surprised me. It
is hard to get consistent baked goods when you are guessing at the
temperature. When did oven thermometers become widely available?

~~~
trepanne
[https://slate.com/human-interest/2012/08/bake-
at-350-degrees...](https://slate.com/human-interest/2012/08/bake-
at-350-degrees-oven-temperature-is-uncontrollable-and-we-should-stop-trying-
to-micromanage-it.html)

> By the 1920s, new models of gas and electric ovens gave cooks slightly more
> control over their hot boxes, but the dials still typically only offered
> low, medium, and high settings [...] Around the end of World War II,
> manufacturers started including temperatures on their dials, featuring hash
> marks indicating 10- or 25-degree increments.

This cookbook is from the 20s; we're talking about gas ranges, and the temp
control was done by metered flow to the pilot. Low/medium/high settings from
the manufacturer did offer consistency, and the gas mark settings on English
ovens better specificity... but the state of the art in retail hasn't really
advanced hugely over the past century. The thermostats in home ovens are
terrible; variance of 50degF or more across time and volume is common. Hence
the continued prevalence of mitigating techniques like water baths, covering
in foil or parchment, rotating/shuffling baking sheets, etc.

