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For Cake (Cupful sugar cupfuls flour)
1 cupful sugar 3 cupfuls flour 1/2 teaspoonful salt 4 eggs 1/2 cupful Crisco 1 cupful milk 2 teaspoonfuls vanilla extract 3 teaspoonfuls baking powder
This is a proportion list rather than a method — the book assumes the reader already knows how a butter-style cake is assembled. The quantities are sound and translate directly to modern measures.
- No method givenThe book supplies no method; the usual period assembly would be to cream the sugar and shortening, beat in the eggs, then add the sifted dry ingredients alternately with the milk, with the vanilla added as it goes. The list is not printed in the order of use. Nothing in the list requires a technique that has since changed.
- Cupful and teaspoonfulA cupful is 8 fl oz, the same as a modern US cup. Spoon measures in a book of this kind are most likely intended level, in which case 3 teaspoonfuls of baking powder is 1 tablespoon.
- CriscoStill sold, and the recipe was written to sell it. Any solid vegetable shortening works; current formulations are based largely on soybean and palm oil rather than the cottonseed oil of the original, and are somewhat softer, so cream it cold from the tin rather than at room temperature. An equal weight of butter gives better flavour but a denser, less tender crumb.
- FlourHousehold flour in this period was often softer than modern all-purpose. Cake flour, or all-purpose with two tablespoons per cup replaced by cornstarch, may get closer to the intended texture.
- OvenThe recipe gives no oven direction at all. A cake of these proportions suits a moderate oven, around 350F; two 9-inch layers roughly 25 to 30 minutes, a single tube or loaf pan 45 to 55.
- YieldAbout 2 1/2 lb of batter — two 9-inch layers, one large tube cake, or roughly 24 cupcakes.
A Calendar of Dinners was written by Marion Harris Neil and published by Procter & Gamble as an advertising cookbook for Crisco, the hydrogenated vegetable shortening the company introduced in 1911. The page is a plain proportion list rather than a full recipe, and it shows that a familiar four-egg cake can be made with half a cupful of shortening in place of butter or lard. Cookbooks of this kind did a great deal to teach American home bakers a fat that had no culinary tradition behind it. The bones of the formula — sugar, flour, eggs, fat, milk, baking powder — are the standard turn-of-the-century layer cake.