Welcome to the Food, Glorious Food blog series. This new, limited series is a companion blog series to the Museum’s temporary exhibition of the same name, now on display in the Museum’s lobby and Burgoyne Room through autumn 2025.

Throughout the series, Curator Kathleen Powell and Public Programmer Abbey Stansfield (both the expert bakers here at the Museum), will be exploring Victorian-era recipes and local food history to help us all appreciate the importance of food and its history in our daily lives.

In this edition of Food, Glorious Food, we’re back with another sweet treat: Wartime Cake, written and baked by Curator Kathleen Powell.

Bon Appetit!

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Wartime Cake
Publisher: Westminster United Church Women’s Association
From: Victory Recipes, 1942-1945 submitted by Mrs. Dunn

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2 tablespoons lard, 2 cups brown sugar, 1 cup seedless raisins, 1 teaspoon cinnamon, cloves, salt, 2 cups flour, 2 teaspoons of baking powder, ½ teaspoon baking soda mixed with one teaspoon hit water. Bake in a moderate oven 45 minutes.

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The Second World War began for Canadians on September 10, 1939, and plunged the country into mobilization to fight a war both abroad and on the home front. With the First World War still a fresh memory, those at home recalled the shortages and rationing of goods that accompanied full mobilization just 20 years previous. Housewives were again encouraged to mobilize their households to meet the needs of the country at war. Both the government and propagandists took advantage of the patriotic spirit of Canadian women to pitch their campaigns directly towards housekeepers and their duty to their country and soldiers. Throughout the war government messaging linked food consumption to the overall success of the war effort with slogans like “Food Will Win the War” and “Food is a Weapon of War.”

Let’s take a step back and look at the city of St. Catharines early on in the war. The 1941 census has the most current demographic information for the city during the Second World War.

In 1941, the population of what is today the city of St. Catharines was 42,043 (including the communities of Port Dalhousie, Merritton, and Grantham Township.) The average earnings for a worker in 1941 was $1270 for men and $585 for women. There were 7443 individual households in St. Catharines with an average of 3.9 persons per household.

In 1939, the community was coming out of the Depression and the employment outlook was looking positive overall. The largest infrastructure project was the building of the Queen Elizabeth Way highway which provided work for many local unemployed. While the local relief committee continued to provide support to those out of work, mobilization for war by the end of 1939 had essentially eliminated any residual employment issues in the city.

The 1940’s saw significant wartime population growth with growth from 28,625 in 1940 to 35,096 in 1946 (not including Port Dalhousie, Merritton, and Grantham Township for which information was not available.) Most of this population growth was as a result of migration within Canada as workers searched for factory work rather than external immigration.

As St. Catharines mobilized for war for a second time in a generation, the community got behind the efforts. Organizations such as the Red Cross, the Canadian Women’s Voluntary Service, St. John’s Ambulance Brigade, among others contributed to the war effort including sending over 231,000 articles of knitted clothing for distribution overseas, 28,000 blood donations, $20,000 in cash donations, and 1.6 million pounds of salvage to be recycled for war industries.

Additionally, Victory Loan campaigns locally contributed hundreds of thousands of dollars and local organizations provided home nursing, local entertainments for soldiers, and general support to the efforts to victory. One example of this is the Victory Recipes book published by the Westminster United Church Women’s Association.  

The preface of the book states this about the Church Women’s efforts:

Almost all of the important things for good cooking are, in these war days, scarce or definitely rationed. This, along with the necessity of making our needs fit our war time purse has produced a marked change in cooking habits.

The lunch box has definitely entered our lives, and it must be filled daily with attractive and nourishing foods. The use of substitutes for a lunch in the mid-morning and something at noon that will carry him through to the hot night meal. The night worker wants something hot in the morning and a good lunch for the mid-night. Our times have changed and our material and people are on a war time footing.

We have kept these changed conditions in mind while making this book. We sincerely hope that the suggestions presented, along with a lot of good Canadian horse sense, will help our readers to lighten the task of war time meals.

Rationing was a fact of daily life for homemakers in war time cooking. By 1943, tea, coffee, sugar, butter and meat were rationed. Households were provided with ration books full of coupons which were pulled from the book for redemption at the local grocers.

The newspaper ran information relating to rationing on the women’s page of the paper and provided a schedule of when ration coupons could be redeemed.

As women readers in the January 5, 1943 St. Catharines Standard were advised:

The year ahead is not going be an easy one for the majority of us. There will be heartache and sorrow in many a home as the shadows of war lengthen, but for all of us there is the knowledge that we as women have new responsibilities, face new demands on our mental, spiritual and physical strength, demands that must be met if we are not to fail our family, our country, ourselves.

The Recipe