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Cocoanut Layer Cake
Beat 1/4 cup Crisco with 1 cup sugar till creamy, add 2 well beaten eggs, 1/4 teaspoon salt, 2 1/2 cups flour sifted with 2 teaspoons baking powder, 1 cup water and 1/2 teaspoon almond extract, mix and divide into Criscoed and floured layer tins. Bake 20 minutes in moderate oven. Use boiled frosting and shredded cocoanut for filling.
A lean, water-based layer cake from one of Procter & Gamble's Crisco promotion books, written when the shortening was new enough to need advertising. A few conventions of the period need translating.
- Moderate ovenIn period usage roughly 350-375F; the book gives no figure. Twenty minutes suits thin layers, but start testing early, since a batter this lean dries out quickly once past done.
- CriscoAny solid vegetable shortening works, measured as 4 tablespoons. Butter can be substituted at the same volume and will taste better, but the crumb will be less tender and the cake will brown faster.
- Pans"Layer tins" were round layer pans, commonly 8 or 9 inches across; the recipe does not say how many, and this quantity of batter may fill more than two. Grease and flour them, or line the bottoms with parchment; the batter has little fat to release itself.
- Mixing orderAdd the flour and the water alternately in three or four additions rather than all at once, as the terse wording suggests. Dumping a full cup of water into a creamed mixture holding only a quarter cup of fat will break it and leave streaks of dry flour.
- Water, not milkWater-based cakes appear frequently in the Crisco books. Milk may be used instead and gives a softer, slightly richer crumb.
- CocoanutShredded coconut of the period was usually sold dried and unsweetened, drier than today's sweetened flake. If using sweetened bagged coconut, you may want to reduce the sugar in the frosting slightly, or the filling will be cloying.
- Boiled frostingThe book assumes you know it: sugar syrup cooked to the soft-ball stage, 238-240F, beaten in a thin stream into stiff egg whites until it holds a peak. Spread it while still warm and workable, then press coconut into the filling layer at once so it adheres.
- YieldThe recipe does not state the number of layers or servings. The almond extract is the only flavoring, so use a fresh bottle; a half teaspoon of stale extract will read as nothing at all.
A Calendar of Dinners belongs to a genre that flourished in the 1910s: the cookbook published by a manufacturer to teach cooks how to use a new product. Crisco, hydrogenated vegetable shortening, reached the market in 1911, and Procter & Gamble distributed recipe books in which cakes, pie crusts and fried dishes called for it by name, down to "Criscoed" pans. Cakes made with water instead of milk appear among the recipes as well. Shredded coconut, once a luxury, had become an inexpensive pantry staple by then, and coconut layer cake with boiled frosting was a familiar company cake. The older spelling "cocoanut," standard through the nineteenth century, was already giving way to "coconut" when this book was printed.