By Elizabeth Gittemeier
Lillian Gittemeier raised her family on a small chicken farm in Bowling Green, Mo., during the Great Depression of the 1930s. She loved her family and raised them all with a strong work ethic. Throughout the Great Depression she sold all of the eggs from her chickens and used the money to sparingly to feed her family of seven.
This meant that she could not afford butter, milk, or eggs. But she wanted to provide an affordable treat for her family when they came in from a hard day of work on the farm. After several days of experimenting, she created a dish called “Eggless, Butterless, Milkless Cake.” She served this cake frequently and her family fell in love with it.
After her sons moved out of the house and got married, they still craved Grandma Gittemeier’s cooking, especially her cake, and begged for the recipe. At this point, there was no written recipe because she just made the cake from what she had around the house. She soon gave into her sons’ pleas and wrote down some loose instructions for each of daughter-in-law.
Her grandchildren fell in love with Grandma Gittemeier’s cake and renamed it “Raisin Cake.” This recipe has trickled down through the generations, and circulated through Kansas City and other towns around Kansas, becoming a Gittemeier family trademark.
Each generation of Gittemeier women make notes and slight alterations to improve the recipe, but the cake that we cook today is very similar to what Gittemeier served in the 1930s.
Raisin Cake
From Lillian Graver Gittemeier
2 cups water
2 cups sugar
2 cups raisins
1 cup lard
1 teaspoon cloves
2 teaspoons of cinnamon
1/8 teaspoon salt
2 teaspoons baking soda
1 teaspoon warm water
3 ½ cups sifted flour
Preheat oven to 225 degrees.
Bring 2 cups of water to a boil. Add in the sugar, raisins, lard, cloves, cinnamon, and salt and let them boil for 2 minutes. Let mixture cool.
Mix together baking soda and warm water and add to mixture. Stir in flour.
Pour mixture into a floured 12 cup Bundt cake pan. Bake at 225 degrees for 2 hours and 15 minutes.
Makes 12 to 16 servings
Note: Raisin cake was originally cooked in a slow oven, which is about 268 degrees. In this recipe, it is cooked at 225 degrees to produce a similar result to the slow oven. If the cooking time needs to be decreased, the cake can also be cooked at 325 degrees for 1 hour.
