There are so many mysteries in the recipes that I have from Mom. I suspect that this recipe is something that she came up with when she and Dad were living in Littleton. They built a little house with their own four hands. Dad was an excellent carpenter, but he was sometimes restricted in his design by the size and shape of the foundation they could afford or could fit into the space. There were a hell of a lot of rocks in the county! Plenty to build a foundation but terrible to dig around. Also the frost went pretty deep there forcing a deep foundation. The house that we(mostly my sister and brother along with Mom and Dad) lived in was quite a nice design while the house he built for Grammie was a bit strange...too tall for the rest of the dimensions mostly. They lived so far from the town and in relative poverty that they had to improvise and she had to do all the cooking herself with minimal resources. Dad was working mostly as a farm hand on the Campbell and perhaps other farms in the area. The boss' wife was Dot Campbell. Mom always said that Dot had to be a real Cooking Machine. There were often a number of hands to feed in addition to the family. Cakes, pies, cookies, pickles...everything you could imagine always had to provide for a farm and all made at least partially from produce from the gardens they planted. They also probably did a lot with game. The woods had plenty of deer, bear and wildfowl. It may be that this recipe came from Dot, or it could be from Grammie. In any event it would have been hard to afford the spices in this recipe. They did, however, have tons of fresh milk(Thank you Elsie.) and all the eggs they could want. Yellow cakes were more common and I remember that cakes were a very strong skill of hers. If they could have made sweets from potatoes, they would have been common too. After all, there were plenty of potatoes in Aroostook county.
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