Double Pie
1 cupful sugar 1 cupful sweet milk 2 eggs 2 cupfuls flour 1/2 cupful Crisco 2 teaspoonfuls baking powder 1/2 teaspoonful salt
Under Layer
1 cupful molasses 1 cupful brown sugar 1 pint hot water Plain Crisco Pastry 1 lemon 1 egg 2 tablespoonfuls flour Line large pie plate with pastry.
For under layer. Mix sugar with flour, add molasses, egg well beaten, grated lemon rind, and hot water, and pour into prepared pie plate. For top layer. Cream Crisco and sugar together, add eggs well beaten, milk, salt, flour, and baking powder. Spread mixture over under layer and bake in hot oven thirty-five minutes.
Sufficient for two large pies.
This is a formula rather than a set of directions — the book assumes you know what to do with a creamed batter. The proportions are those of a plain quick cake, baked in two pie tins and sandwiched with filling.
- No method is givenCream the Crisco with the sugar, beat in the eggs, then add the sifted flour, baking powder and salt alternately with the milk. Divide between two greased pie tins (the book gives no size; 8- or 9-inch suits this quantity) and bake.
- Oven and timeThe recipe gives neither. As a modern starting point, a moderate oven of around 350-375F; shallow layers in pie tins should be done in roughly 20-25 minutes; test with a skewer in the centre rather than by colour, since the tops brown early.
- Sweet milkSimply fresh whole milk, specified to distinguish it from the soured milk or buttermilk that older recipes pair with saleratus. Use whole milk, not skim, or the crumb turns dry.
- CriscoStill sold, and this book exists to promote it; the early formulation is generally reckoned to have been firmer than the modern one, though comparisons are hard to pin down. Shortening creams differently from butter, so beat it with the sugar a good three or four minutes. An equal weight of butter works and tastes better.
- Cupful of flourAssume a lightly-filled, levelled cup of about 4 oz / 115 g, not a packed one. Two cups packed will make this batter stiff and the layers tough.
- What makes it "double"Most likely two thin layers rather than one thick cake, filled and served like a pie, though the text here says nothing about it. No filling is given: jam, a thick custard, sweetened whipped cream, or stewed fruit would all suit. Fill only when the layers are completely cold.
- YieldTwo layers; the recipe states no tin size or number of servings.
A Calendar of Dinners was one of the great pieces of early food advertising: Procter & Gamble commissioned it after launching Crisco in 1911, and the household writer Marion Harris Neil supplied a year of menus in which the new hydrogenated vegetable shortening quietly replaced butter and lard in almost every recipe. That accounts for the half cupful of Crisco here in a cake batter where a nineteenth-century book would have written butter. The dish itself belongs to a broad American family of cakes baked thin in pie tins and filled varielly cake or, as here, double pie a way of getting a filled dessert out of a single batter without making pastry.