psmv6: The Alberta date cake

An exercise which started off as using the vagaries of the supply of brick dates as a test of Gemini’s wisdom. This branched off into the origin of the name of the Alberta date cake, in which brick dates are an important ingredient. The snap above, from reference 9, looks very much like the cake that BH makes from time to time – much more so than some of the cakes and tray-bakes offered by Bing. She promises another for the very near future.

Her recipe, well thumbed and snapped above, comes from the Whitworth’s ‘Spice of Life’ cookbook from 1970 or so, reference 1, noticed at reference 2.

Back in 2013, I had been curious enough to ask an Albertan cake shop about it, but the lady there had never heard of it. Still to be found at reference 10, at Lethbridge, Alberta.

A bit more than 100 miles south of Calgary, my mother’s birthplace. Which maybe looked like the snap above when her parents arrived there from England, a little before the First World War.

A place where the US-style sugar coated doughnuts are called spudnuts. A far cry from the sort of thing once sold on the sea front at Yarmouth, here in the UK.

A place which might well have been named by some expatriate wag, with classical training, for the famous river in Ancient Greek.

All this then led to the query to Gemini snapped above. It had not occurred to me at this point that the name of this cake might have been invented by the staff writer for Whitworth.

Gemini starts by explaining that this Alberta was probably Princess Louise Caroline Alberta, the fourth daughter of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, who went on to become the wife of the Marquess of Lorne, who served as the Governor General of Canada – where the province of Alberta was named in her honour. Which is probably fair enough.

However, he goes on to tell me that in the Victorian and Edwardian periods, naming a rich, dark cake (especially one using "exotic" colonial ingredients like dates) after a member of the Royal family was the ultimate marketing tool. The ‘Alberta Date Cake’ was a staple in British and Canadian high-society tea rooms, bridging the gap between the Prince Consort's legacy and his daughter's vice-regal status in the Commonwealth. Furthermore, in Canada, it evolved into what is often called Matrimonial Cake or Date Squares, but the formal ‘Alberta Date Cake’ title remains a nod to that royal lineage.

While diligent search fails to reveal anything of the sort. I turn up a lot of cakes involving dates, some of them very similar to the one in question, but nowhere do we get the name ‘Alberta date cake’.

Gemini has put too much weight on my belief that the name came before my cookbook and has done a fine job of joining up the dots on that basis.

But my failure eventually resulted in a brain wave. The ‘Alberta date cake’ actually was a name invented by the Whitworth staff writer, possibly with the sort of background cooked up by Gemini. A marketing spin on a pre-existing recipe. I try a change of tack.

Gemini changes tack with me, again putting plenty of weight on my input.

He provides interesting information about the background to the method used for this particular cake, soaking the dates in boiling water and then adding soda – a response to 1940s and 1950s shortage of cooking fats, particularly butter. And he more or less ends with:

‘… You were spot on. The ‘Alberta’ name is a linguistic ghost – a clever 1970s marketing spin on a Victorian royal name, applied to a wartime baking technique. It’s a ‘fusion’ cake that exists more in the memories of those who own that specific Whitworth’s book than it does on the modern internet…’.

I now think that this is the right answer, explaining, inter alia, why I was not able to turn up anything about a cake with this name.

Names of cakes

Whitworth’s has four sections on cakes containing around 60 cakes, although a statistician would worry about the unit of counting; when did a minor variation of a cake count as a new cake? And what about the loaf cakes in the biscuit section?

Around half these cakes have names involving the key, the differentiating ingredient. Around a quarter have names derived from person, place or festival. And the remaining, rather larger, quarter have what I have dubbed fantasy names.

Some examples of these three groups:

• Honey sandwich cake, Chocolate layer cake
• Dundee cake, Simnel cake
• Sand cake, Fairy cakes, Rock cakes

Of these, the Simnel cake, strongly associated with Lent, Easter, and Mothering Sunday (a quarter day, a day off for servants) has an interesting history, some of which can be seen at reference 4. According to Webster’s, ‘simnel’ started life as an old French word for a high grade flour, suitable for making a high grade cake, itself probably derived from a Semitic original.

I have no idea what a Dundee cake would be called in Dundee, a town where, I dare say, they used to have elaborate tearooms. Perhaps they still do.

We get very good rock cakes from the café at Yaverland on the Isle of Wight, named for their hard exteriors; filling smashing even. While BH’s mother used to make fine fairy cakes, a sort of sponge cupcake involving a modest amount of dried fruit; a sponge which was a fairly natural yellow. Made in a paper cup, but nothing like the luridly coloured, sugary confections sold as cupcakes in snack bars now.

As if happens, when I ask Bing about the paper cases BH’s mother used to use, he starts off with some very florid cases, very much in tune with said snack bars – but he gets the right idea soon enough, turning up the cases above. Much more like what I had in mind.

I have excluded biscuits, scones and quickbreads, some of which might well be thought of as cakes, for example, the overnight tea loaf.

Statistical complications aside, we seem to have a situation where we have a lot of cakes listed in a book and where one wants a name for each cake. One wants to be able to refer to it, to put it in the index. One wants the name to be helpful, which excludes, for most purposes anyway, the use of an identifier such as a computer might us, perhaps ‘cake #8745’.

And one it apt to run out of names. One has to get inventive. Hence names like the ‘Alberta date cake’. Some of these names will catch on, will become part of the regular vocabulary, in the way of the Victoria sponge and the Battenburg cake. But most will not.

More on simnels

The simnel cake seems to be associated with both Easter – a moon based, religious date – and Lady Day – a sun based, quarter day, widely used in various commercial and legal transactions. While I am strongly associated with Michaelmas Day.

A clash of two different systems, resulting in a complicated back story for these cakes. For which see references 4, 5, 6 and 7.

There is also semolina, derived from the same roots.

While the name of one of the pretenders to the throne of Henry VII, Lambert Simnel, suggests that the name of a sort of flour had become a surname by the end of the fifteenth century. I suspect a baker or a miller connection. See reference 11. But Simnel does not appear in reference 12, so it would seem that it has never been a given name.

Odds and ends

Along the way, I also had a go at street names, but that was not very productive, at least not for present purposes. But see reference 8.

I am reminded that having a supply of printed books to hand provides a useful supplement to the online offering. There is lots of stuff which does not make it online and so does not make it to the AI assistants.

No doubt there are big brains out there writing learned papers about what sort of stuff does get online and what sort of stuff gets indexed by the likes of Bing. What is not getting online? No index, no visibility to AI or anyone else.

There is also the matter of what some people call intellectual property rights. If your company makes its living by knowing more about some arcane matter than anyone else, it is going to do its best to protect that knowledge, to keep it out of the public domain, to keep it out of reach of the Internet search engines. Not that academics are immune from this sort of thing: an academic might preach about openness, but he might also guard the contents of his next book with some ferocity.

Then there is the quest. In this case, the quest has been as interesting, as much fun, as the kill – and Gemini has been very good on the quest. I believe the same is true in other contexts. And, as an amateur, it is fine in this context. But in a business context, one is more interested in the kill. If one was, for example, thinking about investing in a shipyard, what you might want to know is the track record of the ships that it has built in the recent past. You don’t want a history of how welding has largely superseded rivets in fixing steel plates to the sides of ships, interesting though that might be.

Conclusions

Names in the making. A reminder that names are living things with a life history – and sometimes a short life.

I learn that Gemini is still putting a lot of weight on user input. Sometimes he would do better to put less. Notwithstanding, he turned up a lot of useful and interesting stuff.

References

Reference 1: Spice of life cookery book – Whitworth’s – 1970? Fourth edition.

Reference 2: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2020/05/whitworths-spice-of-life-cookery-book.html.

Reference 3: https://psmv6.blogspot.com/2026/02/more-names.html.

Reference 4: https://www.lovefood.com/news/56501/the-curious-tale-of-the-springtime-simnel-cake#/goog_rewarded. Advertisement infested.

Reference 5: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simnel_cake.

Reference 6: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laetare_Sunday.

Reference 7: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quarter_days.

Reference 8: https://psmv6.blogspot.com/2026/02/a-short-excursion.html.

Reference 9: https://wholesomepatisserie.com/moist-date-cake-recipe/.

Reference 10: https://www.crazycakes.ca/.

Reference 11: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lambert_Simnel.