Mystery Cake

Cakes with alien ingredients have always intrigued North American cooks. But none more so than mystery cake, containing a can of Campbell's condensed tomato soup. Even M.F.K. Fisher liked tomato soup cake. She says in How to Cook a Wolf (1942), "This is a pleasant cake, which keeps well and puzzles people while you are cooking other things, which is always sensible and makes you feel rather noble, in itself a small but valuable pleasure." Fisher's recipe differs from the Campbell's in several respects. For starters, it contains only 3 tablespooons butter and one cup sugar. Even leaner than Fisher's version is cookbook author Jim Fobel's Mystery Cake of 1932, which he says, "is one of the few old recipes that can be precisely dated: It was developed in 1932, during the worst of the Depression. In keeping with the rather desperate circumstances of that time, it contains no eggs and very little butter."
---American Century Cookbook: The Most Popular Recipes of the 20th Century, Jean Anderson [Clarkson Potter:New York] 1997 (p. 448)

Cake Ingredients:
- 2 c. all-purpose flour
- 1 and 1/3 c. sugar
- 4 tsp. baking powder
- 1 tsp. baking soda
- 1 ½ tsp. allspice
- 1 tsp. cinnamon
- ½ tsp. ground cloves
- ½ c. melted butter
- 1 can condensed tomato soup
- 2 eggs
- 1/2 c. water or milk
- 1/2 c. raisins
- 1/2 c. walnuts

Preheat oven to 350º F.. Grease and flour two 9-inch round cake pans or 13 x 9-inch sheet pan. Sift the dry ingredients together in a large bowl. Add the butter and the soup, then beat at a low speed for 2 minutes, scraping the sides and bottom of bowl. Add the eggs and water or milk. Beat for 2 minutes longer then fold the nuts and raisins into the batter. Pour the batter into prepared pans and bake 40 to 45 minutes or until a toothpick inserted in the centre of the cake comes out clean. Let stand in the pans for 10 minutes; remove and cool on rack. Spread the cream cheese icing thickly between layers and top and sides of the cake.

Icing Ingredients:
- 1 pkg. cream cheese
- 1 and 1/2 c. icing sugar
- 1 tsp. vanilla
- 2 tsp. warm water.

I recently met up with cousin Marg, who was keen to share her mother's recipe for tomato soup cake. Unfortunately, something was lost in the electronic transfer of the recipe (as in 2 key ingredients, flour and eggs) so I combined her recipe with another (that actually contained flour and eggs). The original recipe was in her mother's Beulah Church cookbook from 1959; I hope that the current combination of recipes can still evoke fond childhood memories for Marg.