Hard Times Tomato Soup Cake

[00:00] When you think of cake, the first thing that comes to mind naturally is tomato soup. Okay, maybe not. But it turns out that for much of the 20th century, tomato soup cake was a thing. And I just got to see what this thing tastes like.

[00:14] So I'm making a tomato soup cake with cream cheese icing using a recipe from the Great Depression. So thank you to Trade Coffee for sponsoring this video. As I try my hand at one of the oddest concepts for a cake I have ever come across, tomato soup cake. This time on Tasting History.

[00:35] In the 1930s, during the Great Depression, people were eating a lot of foods that we might think of as rather unorthodox today. Catch up soup, water pie, mashed potatoes with peanut butter. Really anything that was cheap and filling, and that is exactly what tomato soup cake is.

[00:50] It is filling because it's a cake, and it's also cheap because it could be made without the expensive milk and eggs that most cakes during that time called for. But even then, it was a rather perplexing dessert. In 1934, the Detroit Free Press asked its readers,

[01:06] did you ever hear of using tomato soup in a cake? And did you ever hear of a frosting made with cream cheese? If you didn't, then we have some surprises for you today. For we have collected

[01:18] several unusual cake recipes, which I am sure you will be glad to add to your repertoire. The particular thing about these recipes is that a person who wasn't in on the secret would have no idea the unusual ingredients used in making these cakes, but would only know that they were

[01:34] particularly delicious. And so I want to know if they're telling the truth. Will I be able to tell that tomato soup was actually used in this cake other than the fact that I'm making it? I mean, when I taste it, will my taste buds know that it's there? Unfortunately, the newspaper gave us a

[01:50] recipe that we can follow. So it starts by calling for one standard canned condensed tomato soup. The standard in the 1930s and today is 10.75 ounces. Then a half cup or 115 grams of butter,

[02:03] one cup or 200 grams of sugar, two cups or 225 grams cake flour, two teaspoons baking powder, one teaspoon baking soda, a half teaspoon of cloves, one teaspoon of nutmeg, one teaspoon of cinnamon, and a pinch of salt. Then a half teaspoon of vanilla, a half cup or 65 grams of raisins,

[02:19] and a half cup or 50 grams of chopped nuts. I used walnuts. And the original recipe does give the option to use a full cup of raisins or a full cup of nuts, or you can do half and half, which is what I am doing. Then the recipe says to add melted butter to soup and combine with the sugar.

[02:36] Sift the spices, soda, salt, and baking powder with the flour, and add to the first mixture. Then add raisins or nut meats and vanilla. Pour into greased loaf pan and bake at 325 degrees

[02:48] Fahrenheit for 45 minutes to 90 minutes, depending on the shape of the pan. So here's the thing. I am going to follow this recipe exactly as it says, meaning that I am going to use melted butter. But if you want to make this recipe, I would suggest you use softened butter, and you cream that

[03:05] together with the sugar before adding the tomato soup. That is going to let you have a much lighter and fluffier texture to the finished cake rather than using melted butter. But since I'm following it,

[03:17] exactly as Miss Marion F. Sawyer, that's who wrote the recipe says, I am using melted butter. And if it leaves me with a dense and dry cake, then that's just the way that it's got to be. And I will all the more depend on having a nice cup of coffee to

[03:32] wet my whistle, and get that cake down, a cup of coffee from today's sponsor trade. Trade is a coffee subscription service that works with over 55 local roasters throughout the United States to bring freshly roasted coffee straight to your door. And with over 500 different coffees,

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[04:31] max miller to get 30% off of your first subscription. And now with your coffee in hand, let's mix and cake. So the first thing to do is if you are using raisins, you want to toss them in a little flour.

[04:44] This will help stop them from all falling to the bottom of the cake batter once we add them. Then set those aside and pour your condensed tomato soup into a large bowl and then add in the melted butter and stir until completely combined. Then stir in the sugar. And if you are creaming your butter with

[05:01] the sugar, do that before adding the tomato soup. In a separate bowl, you want to sift your cake flour, then sift in the baking powder and the baking soda followed by the spices, the nutmeg, the cinnamon,

[05:13] and the cloves. Whisk all the ingredients together and then add the salt. And you'll notice that I am using a large grain salt. But if I had to do it again, I would use a small grain salt simply because the large grain salt was too big to pass through the sifter, something I only learned as I started to sift

[05:29] the flour mixture into the soup and butter bowl. So I ended up sifting in the flour just a bit at a time and then just had to kind of dump the salt on top of it. It's fine, not a big deal. It's not really going to affect the cake, but you know, use small salt. Once all the dry ingredients are added, then start

[05:43] to fold them into the soup mixture and immediately the baking soda and baking powder will start to react to the acid inside the tomato soup. That is what is going to leaven this cake. So really once you

[05:55] add those two ingredients, you need to work fairly quickly, otherwise you're going to lose all of the carbon dioxide before it actually gets into the oven. Once the flour is folded in, add the vanilla and stir that in and then add the pre-floured raisins and the nuts into the batter and stir just enough

[06:12] until they are well distributed. Then pour the batter into a greased loaf tin. You could also use a square or round cake tin if you prefer. Smooth the top and then pop it into the oven at 325 degrees Fahrenheit, 165 Celsius for, I don't know, as long as it takes to bake. Seeing as the original recipe

[06:30] says to bake it for 45 minutes to 90 minutes depending on the shape of the pan. I'm sorry, that is a massive difference in bake time. I'm not sure what shape pan is going to require double the

[06:43] bake time than another pan. I really don't know, but between that and the melted butter, I'm kind of starting to think that I'm going to end up with a baked monstrosity here. Anyway, I checked mine at around 50 minutes and a toothpick came out fairly clean, so I would say 45 to 50 minutes should do.

[06:59] Then you need to take it out of the oven and let it cool completely and it does need to cool completely before we add the icing, lest all of the icing sluff off like the skin of a well-done turkey. So as this cake cools, let me know in the comments what other interesting historical vintage recipes

[07:16] you would like to see me tackle here on the channel as I tell you a bit about the history of tomato soupcake. Tomato soupcake, like most foods, doesn't have a specific point of origin. Maybe someone did

[07:33] knowingly invent this cake or maybe it just happened out of an act of desperation. Very often cakes that use baking soda to do the leavening use buttermilk as the acid to get that chemical reaction going

[07:47] and as someone who will often start baking without making sure that they have all the ingredients on hand, I can only imagine someone in their kitchen making a cake and opening the fridge and seeing that there

[08:00] is no buttermilk there so they frantically search for something else that has acid and finds tomato soup. Tomatoes have acid so let's give that a shot and voila the tomato soupcake was born

[08:12] or at least that's how I'm picturing it going down. What I can say for certain is that this cake was not invented during the Great Depression despite what you will read online. That is what most

[08:24] people online will say. There's even one cookbook I think it came out in the 90s that is very confident in saying that this is one of the few old recipes that can be precisely dated. It was

[08:36] developed in 1932 during the worst of the Depression. No it wasn't because with a very quick search of newspapers from before 1932 you will see recipes for this cake. I think my favorite is actually a

[08:51] slight variation on this cake from 1929 that appeared in the Honolulu star bulletin. It said tomato cake is unusual recipes suggested by class and cooking. It is also known as lunch cake. That instead

[09:04] of tomato soup it uses a can of actual tomatoes strained and stewed. But other recipes which do use proper canned tomato soup appear in many newspapers leading up to 1932 including one that one uses melted

[09:20] butter like the one that we're making today and claims that it's the type of cake that will appeal to the entire family from the youngest up to the oldest and particularly to the male members of the household. What a weird thing to say. Why particularly the male members? Because there is no further explanation

[09:37] why why that would be. So if you have any ideas why male members of the family would particularly like this cake let me know your thoughts in the comments. Now while it is clear that this cake was definitely being made before the Great Depression which started in 1929 it was not always under the name

[09:55] tomato soup cake. Like the recipe that we're making today says that it could also sometimes be called soup to nuts cake. There was also believe it or not cake. Husbands cake and mystery cake. Now many

[10:07] people claim that mystery cake was another name for tomato soup cake and it was and it wasn't because mystery cake was really a whole genre of cakes that were popular at the time that had a mystery

[10:21] ingredient. Something that wouldn't typically be in the cake that didn't necessarily flavor the cake and so that would leave the taster with a bit of a mystery to figure out what that ingredient was.

[10:35] In addition these mystery cakes were often the subjects of competitions looking for the best new name for the mystery cake. They would give the recipe, you would make it at home and then you would send in the name that you think it should be called. I do love that at one point they had to start adding

[10:52] the fact that you shouldn't mail in the actual cake and I just wonder how many people mailed in physical cakes before they had to put that on the advertisement. But by the mid 1930s while some people did still call the cake by other names tomato soup cake seems to have kind of become the standard

[11:08] and it was somewhat popular. It was being made especially in houses that were trying to stretch a dollar or pinch a penny I guess back then because a dollar was a lot of money. Mainly because it was

[11:21] cheap but it was also different. Smart hostesses like the novelty of this tempting tomato soup cake with its velvety cream cheese icing and budget-minded housewives prick up their ears when they learn that both cake and frosting are inexpensive. She then goes on to give the recipe for the frosting but should you

[11:39] want the actual recipe for the cake? Well then Mary Meade will send you the recipe for the tomato soup cake on receipt of a self-addressed stamped envelope. Today we complain about having to scroll to the bottom

[11:53] of a website just to get to the actual recipe and that is rather annoying but nowhere near as annoying as having to write into a newspaper with an envelope and a stamp to ask for a recipe which would

[12:06] then take weeks to get sent to you. So we are rather spoiled today at least when it comes to recipes. But it is kind of a double-edged sword this easy access to information because while you can get a recipe on the fly you can also complain about said recipe very very easily. Today the comment

[12:25] sections below recipes are often filled with complaints sometimes warranted complaints but sometimes it's people mad that their whipped cream didn't come out only to tell people that they didn't use

[12:38] cream they used almond milk and are still mad that it didn't come out. So if you had a complaint though in the 1930s or 40s about a recipe you actually had to write in to make your complaint

[12:51] fully to your professor do it before he goes around telling people how to cook does he ever think of trying out his own recipes I bit on that tomato soup cake concoction in Fridays paper it was a

[13:04] waste of time effort and ingredients after eating the cake my little girl was terribly sick to her stomach and my husband felt too bad to go to work Monday before you print any more commands like

[13:18] tomato soup cake please cancel my subscription to your dumb paper dislike unsub I can't believe somebody actually wrote into the newspaper writing that but it's a real quote anyway for me today

[13:32] it's very easy to find all of these different tomato soup recipes because I have access to databases like newspapers.com where they have all the newspapers that I can just search through and find them

[13:44] but that was not the case in the 1930s and 40s. If you wanted a recipe for this cake you either had to have a friend send it to you right into the newspaper to get it or just hope that your local

[13:56] newspaper printed this recipe. So while it seems like this recipe was absolutely everywhere at the time it actually was not it was really still quite a novelty to most people and very few people seem to

[14:10] have even known about its existence. People like Gene Autry this singing cowboy himself when he came across tomato soup cake he was plum flower-gasted. I've eaten a lot of strange things on the range such

[14:24] as soft boiled bacon beans that turned out to be half gravel son of a gun stew and bread you could patch tires with but I've never eaten tomato soup cake. Those chuck wagon pilots are the greatest

[14:36] experimenters you ever saw when they hear about tomato soup cake they're going to try to improve on it. One of these days some weary cowboys after a hard day in the saddle are going to ride up to the chuck wagon and be dished up some clam chowder cake or split pea pie. But while tomato soup cake may

[14:54] have remained a rather niche baked good it was the perfect baked good for the people who were actually making the canned tomato soup. During the 1930s recipes start cropping up that suggest using specific

[15:09] brands namely Heinz tomato soup and Campbell's tomato soup and it was Campbell's who really went in on this. See Campbell's was the first commercial producer of canned tomato soup in 1895 and then

[15:24] condensed tomato soup two years later and it was an immediate success partly because it was quick to make partly because it was very inexpensive and partly because it was marketed by the Campbell's

[15:36] kids. These were a series of chubby faced cartoon characters that featured prominently in Campbell's marketing campaigns for decades. They were absolutely everywhere and they even sold them as physical

[15:48] dolls. But most often they would be shown in ads alongside a little poem touting the Campbell's brand even if the poems at times were historically questionable. Like the time that the Campbell's soup kid dressed as George Washington declared like Washington air deeds are done with forethought I prepare.

[16:05] I feed my troops on Campbell's soups so let the phobia wear. So while these loveable if maybe a little creepy children did their marketing thing for the Campbell's soup the soup was still only good for

[16:17] eating out of a bowl and how much soup can a person eat so their sales were limited and so when they came across this recipe for tomato soup cake Campbell's was like yonk I'll take that. They

[16:32] actually started with something slightly different and much less popular and that was the tomato soup based steamed fruit and nut pudding which came out in 1940 but it didn't exactly hit the mark because steamed puddings were kind of losing steam here in the United States and so in 1942 they released a

[16:49] Halloween spice cake made with tomato soup which was essentially just the tomato soup cake that we're having today but topped with a bunch of Halloween decorations then they took off those decorations and had just the tomato soup spice cake though at first they made it without any cream

[17:04] cheese frosting and it was actually well well after the rationing of World War II ended that they started to add that cream cheese frosting this book which a viewer sent me which I think is from like the 1960s does have the recipe in it and it does have the cream cheese frosting along with several other

[17:21] cake recipes along with like 200 other canned soup recipes and books like this that are cookbooks based around a single company a single brand were really popular for much of the 20th century I don't

[17:36] really see him anymore but for a long time really big now while the original tomato soup cake was a spiced cake the Campbell's brand went on to expand the tomato soup cake universe with a chocolate

[17:48] version in 1951 and this was followed up by an apricot or prune upside down tomato soup cake in 54 and a rosy chiffon tomato soup cake in 56 now by the 1960s boxed cake mix had really become popular

[18:01] and so Campbell's began investigating ways to use these to make the cake and in 1966 after years of testing Campbell's came up with something that their archives dubbed experiment number 38 which kind

[18:15] of reminds me of Lilo and Stitch stitch being experiment 626 and essentially this was a version of the cake that just used a box of spiced cake mix a can of Campbell's tomato soup and some water half

[18:32] cup of water and two eggs and really the eggs were actually completely optional the thing is while this recipe would have made making the cake easier it came at a time when the glory days of tomato soup

[18:44] cake were long behind her by the 1960s when you do see recipes they are written as if this is a dish from a bygone era tomato soup cake was the talk of every city town and hamlet in the country about 30

[19:00] years ago many modern home makers still like to bake this moist spice cake studded with raisins it can be made with a mix 1960s style or by the mixed from scratch recipe of the 30s and I love that

[19:14] even in 1967 it had to be explained to incredulous readers who had just never heard of such a thing in addition to scout work music and collecting brick-a-brack Mrs Miller loves to bake tomato soup cake yes

[19:27] tomato soup cake if you like a dessert that's not overly sweet but is still dessert advises Mrs Miller try tomato soup cake it's rich in filling but just a little bit different and believe it or not

[19:40] it doesn't taste like soup especially with cream cheese frosting so in the 1960s it was like they were rediscovering this dish from the past and we are still doing it today because the first time

[19:53] that I ever heard about this dessert was when Bidouin Hollis made it over on TikTok and ever since I have wanted to try it for myself to see if I could actually pick out the tomato soup in the cake's

[20:05] flavor but to do so I need to actually finish making it and that means finishing the frosting and there is a cream cheese frosting recipe that comes from the same newspaper where we got our cake

[20:17] the 1934 newspaper and it just calls for one and a half cups or 180 grams of confectioners sugar one package of cream cheese and a half teaspoon of vanilla so use beaters to soften up the cream cheese and then carefully add the powdered confectioners sugar just a little at a time and you just

[20:32] want to do a little bit and on low speed otherwise the sugar goes absolutely everywhere once the sugar is fully incorporated beat in the vanilla and then spread the icing all over that fully cooled cake then slice and serve and here we are tomato soup cake using a recipe from the Great Depression

[20:50] I will say the color is maybe a little influenced by the tomato soup which totally makes sense um but it doesn't smell like tomato soup so here we go

[21:08] hmm no tomato soup flavor found I need another bite that's good cake that's really good cake um reminds me of carrot cake kind of

[21:34] just you know it's a lot of same spices especially this one it has the raisins and the nuts and everything so very carrot cake-ish it is moist I think it would be a little bit lighter if I

[21:47] cream the butter but not a lot it's not super dense it's not super stodgy or anything like that it is super good though and super easy and you should absolutely make it because why not

[22:00] you need to be able to tell people yes yes I have tried tomato soup cake and yes it is quite good now there's actually a famous story about uh this cake or rather a person making tomato soup cake

[22:14] and that was the author Sylvia Platt who got a recipe from her mother in 1961 and she made it and it did not go well she says that it was probably uh had to do with the fact that her mother

[22:29] and the recipe came from America but she was actually living in England at the time so then in a letter that she wrote to her mother she said I didn't think to question but our cans seemed to be bigger than yours as my cake was a bit wet this is not wet this is just nice and moist and absolutely as a

[22:47] cake should be again super easy go make it there's no reason not to and uh I will see you next time on Tasting History