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Flag Cake
2/3 cup sugar, 1/2 cup Crisco, 2/3 cup milk, 1 2/3 cups flour, 2 teaspoons baking powder, 1/2 teaspoon salt, whites of 4 eggs, and 1 teaspoon vanilla. Cream Crisco and sugar together, add flour, salt, baking powder, milk, vanilla and whites of eggs beaten to a stiff froth. Mix carefully, turn into Criscoed and floured tin and bake in moderate oven for 3/4 of an hour. Decorate with frosting and tiny flags.
A plain white butter-style cake made with shortening, from one of the Crisco-sponsored cookbooks of the 1910s. The method as written is unusually casual about the egg whites, which is where most of the risk of failure lies.
- Fold, do not stirThe instruction to "mix carefully" is doing a lot of work. Beat the whites to a stiff froth separately, combine the creamed shortening, sugar, milk and dry ingredients into a smooth batter first, then fold the whites in with a spatula in two or three additions. Beating them in will deflate them and give you a dense, slightly rubbery crumb.
- Moderate oven350F. The cake is done when a skewer comes out clean and the top springs back.
- TimingThree-quarters of an hour suits a deep pan, not a shallow one. In an 8-inch square or a loaf tin, start checking at 30 minutes; in two 8-inch layers it will be done in 20-25.
- Pan size is not givenThe batter runs to roughly 3 cups, which fills one 8-inch square or round tin, or a small loaf. Grease and flour it as directed, or line the base with parchment.
- CriscoStill sold, and the recipe was written to promote it. Any solid vegetable shortening works; the cake will be very white and tender but bland. Butter in the same quantity gives more flavour and a slightly firmer crumb, though the colour will be creamier.
- Baking powderTwo teaspoons to 1 2/3 cups flour is about the usual modern proportion, perhaps a touch generous. It will rise well; do not increase it, and get the cake into the oven promptly once the whites are folded in.
- The four yolksNothing here uses them. Custard, mayonnaise or hollandaise are the traditional destinations.
- Yield and finishingServes six to eight. A plain white boiled icing or buttercream is period-appropriate; the "tiny flags" are paper cake ornaments, and they are what makes this a patriotic-occasion cake rather than an everyday one.
A Calendar of Dinners belongs to a genre of cookbook that barely exists now: the branded recipe collection, issued by a manufacturer to teach cooks how to use a new product. Crisco, a hydrogenated cottonseed-oil shortening, reached American grocers in 1911, and the books that accompanied it worked hard to naturalise the verb "to Crisco" a tin, as this recipe does. The cake itself is an ordinary white cake, the kind built on egg whites alone for the sake of a pale crumb, and the flags are the whole point of the name: small paper Stars and Stripes were a familiar patriotic garnish for tables in this era.