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For Cake (Tablespoonfuls sugar)
6 tablespoonfuls sugar 3 tablespoonfuls Crisco 3 eggs 1/4 teaspoonful salt 1 teaspoonful baking powder 12 tablespoonfuls flour Grated rind 1 lemon
This is a formula rather than a set of instructions — the book assumes you know how a plain butter-style cake is put together. The tablespoon measures are the giveaway that it is scaled for a single small layer.
- Convert the tablespoons12 tablespoonfuls flour is 3/4 cup (about 95 g), 6 tablespoonfuls sugar is 6 tablespoons or 3/8 cup (about 75 g), and 3 tablespoonfuls Crisco is about 1 1/2 oz (40 g). Level rather than heaped measures were what domestic-science teaching of the period called for.
- No liquid, and that is deliberateThree whole eggs supply all the moisture for 3/4 cup of flour, which puts this closer to a rich sponge or pound-cake batter than to a milk cake. Do not add milk to loosen it.
- Method the book leaves outCream the Crisco with the sugar and lemon rind, beat in the eggs one at a time, then fold in the flour sifted with the salt and baking powder. Overbeating after the flour goes in will toughen a batter this lean in fat.
- CriscoCrisco is hydrogenated vegetable shortening, still sold and essentially interchangeable here with modern all-vegetable shortening. Butter of the same weight works and tastes better, though the crumb will be slightly less tender.
- OvenThe ingredient list gives no oven direction. For a cake of this size 350F is appropriate; a single thin layer will take roughly 20-25 minutes, a small loaf 30-35.
- Baking powderOne teaspoon to 3/4 cup flour is at the upper end of modern practice. Use a level teaspoon and no more, or the cake may rise fast and sink.
- Lemon rindGrate only the yellow zest and rub it into the sugar before creaming; the oils released that way carry more flavour than rind stirred into the finished batter.
- YieldRoughly one 7-inch layer, a small loaf, or six to eight cupcakes. Doubling the quantities is straightforward if you want a two-layer cake.
A Calendar of Dinners was written by Marion Harris Neil and published by Procter & Gamble as promotional literature for Crisco, the hydrogenated cottonseed-oil shortening the company launched in 1911. Recipes throughout call for Crisco in place of butter or lard, which is why a plain lemon cake — a form cooks had long been making with butter — appears here with three tablespoonfuls of a branded shortening at its head. The all-tablespoon measurement, including twelve tablespoonfuls of flour where many cooks would have written "three-quarters of a cup," is consistent with the period's push toward standardised level measures in domestic-science teaching. Cakes of this kind, small and quickly assembled, were baked in one layer, split or iced simply, and eaten the same day.