This last summer I had a bit of a mania for looking for old-school cookbooks in secondhand shops. My rules were simple; I was not allowed to buy any books that:
- Depend on name recognition to sell (i.e. no celebrity chefs or bloggers);
- Were published to promote a product or brand; or
- Capitalized on a food trend or diet.
It’s pretty surprising how few books were left over after that, which suits my lack of shelf space just fine.
I found a faded and well-used copy of Edna Staebler’s second book, Schmecks Appeal, in a thrift store in Edmonton earlier this year, and the title amused me so much that I had to have it. It turns out that she wasn’t just a random person collating the recipes of Waterloo-area Mennonite women, either — according to the Wikipedia entry for her, she won a respectable set of literary, journalistic, and other awards, including the Order of Canada, and also founded the Edna Staebler Award for creative non-fiction.
All of the above wasn’t on my mind when I pulled out her recipe to use up a zucchini roughly the length and girth of my entire lower leg; I just saw a welcome way to avoid wasting home-grown vegetables. That said, I’m a little tickled that this humble recipe has such a distinguished author.
Details
- Yield: 1 11x17 cake
- Total time: 10 minutes + 25 minutes
- Active: 10 minutes
- Passive: 25 minutes (cooking/baking)
Equipment
- 9”x5” loaf pan
Ingredients
- 2 eggs
- 188 mL (¾ cup) neutral-flavoured oil
- 200 g (1 cup) granulated sugar
- 6 g (1 tsp) table salt
- 4.7 g (1 tsp) vanilla extract
- 120 g (1 cup) all-purpose flour
- 6 g (1 tsp) baking soda
- 1 tsp cinnamon, ground
- 15.75 g (3 tbsp) unsweetened cocoa powder
- 180 g (1-⅓ cups) zucchini, grated — approximate, verify weight
- ½ cup chopped walnuts (optional)
Method
- Grease and flour an 11”x7” brownie pan or equivalent (7.5” diameter bundt pan or 8”x4” loaf pan) and preheat oven to 350°F.
- In a large mixing bowl, mix eggs, oil, sugar, salt, and vanilla extract until blended.
- In a smaller bowl, combine flour, baking soda, cinnamon, and cocoa powder, then mix it into the wet mixture.
- Stir in zucchini and nuts.
- Pour mixture into prepared pan and bake around 25 minutes, until a toothpick inserted in the middle comes out clean.
- Cool a few minutes in pan, then turn cake out onto a rack to cool completely (if intending to frost), or onto a serving plate to serve still warm as is.
Sources
Staebler, Edna. Schmecks Appeal: More Mennonite Country Cooking. McClelland & Stewart, 1987.