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Crisco Batter Cakes
3 eggs 1/2 cupful melted Crisco 1 cupful flour 1 cupful buttermilk 1/2 teaspoonful baking soda 1 teaspoonful baking powder 1/2 teaspoonful salt Beat up yolks of eggs, add milk, Crisco, and flour mixed with salt, soda, and baking powder and beat till smooth. Fold in whites beaten to a stiff froth. Drop in large spoonfuls on ungreased skillet or griddle. Serve hot with butter or maple syrup.
Sufficient for fifteen cakes.
A rich, egg-leavened griddle cake from one of Procter & Gamble's Crisco promotional books, where the shortening naturally appears in everything. The proportions are unusual by modern pancake standards and the batter behaves accordingly.
- The fat is the whole pointHalf a cup of melted shortening to one cup of flour is roughly four times what a modern pancake carries. The recipe calls for an ungreased skillet or griddle, presumably because the cakes carry fat enough of their own; they come out closer to a rich, tender fritter than a diner pancake.
- Crisco, and what to use insteadCrisco in this period was newly introduced hydrogenated cottonseed oil, sold as a clean-tasting substitute for lard. Modern Crisco is reformulated (soybean and palm) but works the same way here. Melted butter or a neutral oil substitutes directly, butter adding flavour and a little browning.
- Melted fat into cold buttermilkPour warm melted shortening into refrigerator-cold buttermilk and it seizes into hard flecks. Let the buttermilk and eggs come to room temperature first, and let the melted fat cool to barely warm before combining.
- CupfulA standard American cupful by the 1910s is 8 fluid ounces, the same as today. No conversion needed.
- Both soda and baking powderThe soda neutralises the buttermilk's acid and the baking powder supplies the rest of the lift. Keep the buttermilk; ordinary milk will leave the soda unreacted and give a soapy, faintly metallic taste.
- The whitesFold, do not stir. The beaten whites contribute much of the lift in a batter this loose and this fatty, and a few streaks left visible are better than a deflated bowl.
- Griddle heatThe recipe gives no temperature. Medium is right, in the usual griddle range of about 350-375F and no higher: the high fat content browns fast, and a hot pan will colour the outside before the centre sets.
- YieldFifteen cakes, which is four modest servings. The batter does not hold well once the whites are folded in, so cook it straight through.
A Calendar of Dinners belongs to a genre that flourished in the first decades of the twentieth century: the branded cookbook, given away or sold cheaply by a manufacturer to teach cooks how to use a product they had no habit of buying. Crisco was launched by Procter & Gamble in 1911 as a hydrogenated vegetable shortening, and the company commissioned Marion Harris Neil to write recipe collections in which it appeared in nearly every dish, from pastry to cake to griddle batter. The commercial motive shows plainly in a batter cake carrying half a cup of shortening to a single cup of flour. What the book preserves, alongside the salesmanship, is a genuine moment of change in the American kitchen: lard and butter had been the working fats for generations, and a shelf-stable white vegetable fat was a real novelty that needed explaining.