Home › Cakes › Crisco Fruit Cake
Crisco Fruit Cake
1 1/2 cupfuls Crisco 1 lb. seeded raisins 2 cupfuls sugar 4 cupfuls flour 6 eggs 1 wineglassful brandy 1/2 lb. blanched and chopped almonds 1/2 lb. English walnut meats (broken in small pieces) 1/2 lb. stoned and chopped dates 1 lb. currants 1 lb. glace cherries 1 teaspoonful baking soda 1 teaspoonful salt 1/2 cupful New Orleans molasses 1/2 cupful cold black coffee 1 teaspoonful grated nutmeg 2 teaspoonfuls powdered cinnamon 1 teaspoonful powdered cloves Cream Crisco and sugar together, add eggs well beaten, beat five minutes, then add coffee, soda mixed with molasses, brandy, flour sifted with salt and spices. Now add raisins, currants, dates, cherries cut in halves, and nuts. Mix carefully and turn into Criscoed and papered tin and bake in moderate oven two and a half hours. Brandy may be omitted.
Sufficient for one large cake.
A full-sized dark fruit cake of the promotional-cookbook era: about ten pounds of batter, four and a half pounds of it fruit and nuts. The proportions still work; the oven advice needs adjusting.
- Oven temperatureA "moderate oven" in this period means about 350F, but a cake this dense and this sugary will scorch at the edges long before the middle sets. Bake at 300-325F and expect the full two and a half hours, or longer.
- WineglassfulA wineglass in American cookbooks of the time is about 2 fluid ounces, or 1/4 cup. The recipe already tells you the brandy can be left out; replace it with more cold coffee or with orange juice if you do.
- CriscoStraight vegetable shortening, and the book exists to sell it. Modern Crisco is reformulated but behaves the same in creaming. An equal weight of unsalted butter gives better flavour and a slightly firmer crumb.
- CurrantsDried Zante currants, a small seedless grape, not fresh red or black currants. They are sold alongside raisins and are not interchangeable with anything else in the list.
- New Orleans molassesOrdinary table-grade cane molasses. Do not use blackstrap, which is bitter and will fight the spices. Molasses is mildly acidic, which is why it is the ingredient the single teaspoon of soda is mixed into.
- The pan"Criscoed and papered" means greased and then lined with paper. A large tube pan or two 9x5 loaf pans will serve, lined with a double thickness of parchment standing an inch above the rim; check the capacity first, as this is a great deal of batter. An outer collar of newspaper or a pan of water below protects the sides during the long bake.
- Testing and yieldDone when a skewer in the centre comes out clean of batter, though it will pick up sticky fruit. One large cake of roughly 8 to 9 lb, or forty to fifty thin slices.
- KeepingThis is a keeping cake. Cool completely in the pan, wrap in brandy-dampened cloth and then in foil, and hold in a cool place for two to six weeks before cutting. It will be crumbly and harsh on the day it is baked.
A Calendar of Dinners was written by Marion Harris Neil and published by Procter & Gamble to promote Crisco, the hydrogenated cottonseed shortening the company had introduced in 1911; the brand name appears in nearly every recipe in the book, and here even as a verb in "Criscoed and papered tin." The cake itself is entirely conventional for the period — a dark, spiced, heavily fruited Christmas cake in the English tradition, leavened only by beaten eggs and a teaspoon of soda answering the molasses. What the recipe was really arguing was that a shortening from the factory could stand in for butter or lard in the most prestigious cake a household made all year, the one baked weeks ahead and judged by relatives.