Despite my upbringing on a dairy farm, one of my favorite desserts from my family’s cookbook is my paternal grandmother’s “wacky cake.” An eggless, butter-less, milk-less treat, my past pleas for this cake met great hesitancy from my Mama1 in the form of soft chuckles, a pained smile, and an “Are you sure that’s what you want?”
The wacky cake the author made while writing this essay.
The recipe is short. I smile at my mother’s misspelling of “wacky” as “wackie” in the version handed down to me. The hesitancy and tension that accompanies this dessert—misspelling and all—speaks to its prior promise and purpose: a recipe handed down and prepared by American women to treat their families in times of crisis.
Although dairy was missing, patriotism made up wacky cake’s origins as a popular rationing cake during World War I. After the Great War, “war cakes” seemingly transformed back into regular desserts, often abandoned given their ties to scarcity and hardship.2 Despite this resistance, the significance of war cake ingredients allowed it to reemerge and adapt during economic and political upheaval. War cakes became “Depression cakes,” which became my Mama’s specific “wacky cake” by World War II.3 It was touted as a “favorite recipe” of the U.S. armed forces, sharing the same timeline as her father’s service in the U.S. 28th division of the 112th infantry, where he was wounded in the drive across France into Germany.4
A 4-H member wins a prize for a wacky cake demonstration, The Star Press (Muncie, IN), June 12, 1948.
After World War II, wacky cake rebranded itself again from dessert-in-crisis to a staple recipe for training rural girls to become heteronormative housewives.5 Featured in 4-H competitions and home economics textbooks, wacky cake became part of an arsenal of recipes wielded by the women who would hold the family unit together through prosperity and hardship.6 With it, women could bring the luxury of dessert—the joy, celebration, and sweetness—to American tables even in the darkest of times.
Given its ties to patriotism and farm education, wacky cake made it into my family’s cookbook. But farm women like my Mama have also had the added pressure of demonstrating her full support for the family dairying business in the kitchen. Mama was a Future Farmers of America (FFA) Chapter Queen and my mother was an Alternate Dairy Princess.7 Both programs emerged in the 1950s and enlisted young farm women to encourage the non-farming public to consume milk.8 One of the ways women did this was through publishing dairy-based recipes in local newspapers, pamphlets, and cookbooks. Farmers hoped these promotional efforts would concretize milk’s place in kitchens across America, but the promotional materials were mostly consumed by other dairy farming families.
The author’s grandmother (pictured far right) voted FFA Chapter Queen. Intelligencer Journal (Lancaster, PA), February 25, 1961.
Farm families are in crisis, and wacky cake is far from the remedy to sustain the dairy industry.9 But we are also in ecological and health crises, and my Mama’s wacky cake recipe has been rebranded yet again. Wacky cake is vegan chocolate cake; a dessert that further signals vulnerability of the dairying business.10 It is a dessert no longer asking to ration dairy ingredients. It asks if we should get rid of them altogether. Just as it signaled economic struggle in the past, wacky cake has come to represent the struggle farmers have found themselves in the twenty-first century. The adaptability of wacky cake has allowed it to last from generation to generation in my family, across various moments of uncertainty. I return to it again, with all its baggage, as we enter a new crossroads of crises today.
Recipe: Mama’s Wacky Cake
Ingredients
1 ½ cups of flour
1 cup sugar
3 Tablespoons cocoa
1 teaspoon baking soda
½ teaspoon salt
6 Tablespoons vegetable oil
1 Tablespoon vinegar
1 Tablespoon vanilla
1 cup water (room temperature)
Directions
Mix ingredients into 8×8 pan. Bake at 350 degrees for 30 minutes.
- Pronounced “maw-maw.”
- Helen Zoe Veit, Modern Food, Moral Food: Self-Control, Science, and the Rise of Modern American Eating in the Early Twentieth Century (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013), 182–83.
- For an example of an advertisement for “Depression Cake” recipe, saying “It calls for no butter, cream, milk, or eggs,” see The American Guardian (Oklahoma City, Oklahoma), April 7, 1933.
- Favorite recipes of the Navy and Marine Corps, San Diego area: including a collection of representative Mexican and old San Diego dishes contributed by descendants of early settlers of San Diego County, (San Diego: The Auxiliary, 1950).
- Gabriel N. Rosenberg, The 4-H Harvest: Sexuality and the State in Rural America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015), 183.
- See for example Favorite recipes of home economics teachers: Desserts ed., including party beverages. (Montgomery, AL.: Favorite Recipes Press, 1963), 34.
- My grandmother was voted Chapter Queen, when the Sweetheart vote ended in a tie: Intelligencer Journal (Lancaster, Pennsylvania), February 25, 1961. For more about FFA “sweethearts,” the only way for women to earn FFA jackets in the 1950s and 1960s, see Peter Liebhold, “Coming of age: Young women and the FFA,” O Say Can You See? (May 24, 2017).
- The first “dairy princess” was originally known as the “Princess Kay of the Milky Way,” established by the Minnesota Dairy Industry Committee in 1954. See “Newest Princess,” National 4-H News, August 1956.
- For a more recent overview of the U.S. dairy farm, see Marian Bull, “The Milk Situation,” New York Times, March 14, 2020.
- Compare this recipe to wacky cake: “Vegan Chocolate Cake,” Allrecipes.com.
