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Feather Cake
Cream 1/2 cup Crisco with 1/2 cup sugar, and 1/2 teaspoon salt, and 2 eggs beaten with 1/2 cup sugar, 1 teaspoon lemon extract, 1 cup milk, 2 1/2 cups flour, and 2 1/2 teaspoons baking powder. Beat 2 minutes and turn into Criscoed and floured cake tin. Bake in moderate oven for 3/4 of an hour.
A plain butter-style cake made with shortening, written in the compressed style of the Crisco cookbooks — the whole method is one sentence, and it leaves out the order that actually matters.
- Read the method as stages, not one bowlCream the Crisco with the first 1/2 cup sugar and the salt; separately beat the eggs with the second 1/2 cup sugar and the lemon extract, then combine. Sift the flour with the baking powder and add it alternately with the milk, in three additions, ending with flour. Dumping everything together at once, as the sentence literally reads, gives a coarse, tunnelled crumb.
- CriscoAll-vegetable hydrogenated shortening, still sold, though reformulated since 1911 to cut trans fats. Modern shortening behaves much the same here. Unsalted butter works and tastes better, but the cake will be slightly less tender and will brown faster.
- "Criscoed" tinGrease with shortening and dust with flour. A single 8- or 9-inch square pan, or two 8-inch rounds, suits this batter; the original gives no size.
- Moderate ovenRoughly 350F, though the period term covers a range up to about 375F. At the lower end 45 minutes suits a single 8- or 9-inch square pan; two thinner layers will be done in 25 to 30 minutes, so test early rather than trusting the stated three-quarters of an hour.
- Lemon extractA full teaspoon of extract is assertive by current taste. The zest of one lemon, creamed in with the shortening, gives the same intent with less of the alcoholic edge.
- DonenessThe top should spring back and a skewer come out clean. Cool in the pan ten minutes before turning out; shortening cakes are fragile while hot.
- YieldAbout 12 servings from a 9-inch square, or an 8-inch two-layer cake. It is a cake meant to be iced or eaten plain with fruit.
"Feather cake" is a nineteenth-century American name for any plain cake claimed to be exceptionally light — the term appears in community and manufacturer cookbooks long before this one, attached not to a single fixed recipe but to a loose family of them. Its appearance here, with Crisco named as an ingredient and even used as a verb, marks the book's real purpose: A Calendar of Dinners was written by Marion Harris Neil and issued by Procter & Gamble to teach cooks that the new hydrogenated vegetable shortening, introduced in 1911, could replace butter and lard in everything from pastry to frying. The chemical leavening the recipe relies on was nothing new by then: soda with cream of tartar, and later baking powder, had been in domestic use since the middle of the nineteenth century, and earlier feather cakes frequently called for it.