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For Cake (Cupful sugar teaspoonful salt)
1 cupful sugar 3/4 teaspoonful salt 1/4 cupful grated chocolate 3/4 cupful Crisco 5 eggs 2 cupfuls flour 1 teaspoonful baking powder 1/2 cupful sultana raisins 1/2 cupful candied chopped citron peel
This is a formula rather than a method — the book gives the proportions and expects the cook to know what to do with them. Everything below is about filling in the gaps.
- No method is printedThe book gives proportions only. A creamed-shortening treatment is the obvious reading: cream the Crisco with the sugar, beat in the eggs, add the flour sifted with baking powder and salt, then the chocolate, raisins and citron. Baking time and temperature are not given anywhere in the recipe; a moderate oven around 350F for roughly 50-60 minutes in a loaf or tube pan is a modern guess, not the book's instruction.
- CriscoStill sold, though the modern product has been reformulated and is no longer the partially hydrogenated cottonseed-oil shortening of this period. It is the fat the book existed to promote: unsalted vegetable shortening. Butter can be substituted by volume, bearing in mind butter contains water and is salted in most brands, so cut the added salt if you use it.
- The salt figureThree-quarters of a teaspoon for two cupfuls of flour is unremarkable by modern standards. Since the specified fat is unsalted, reduce it if you swap in salted butter.
- Grated chocolateIn 1915 this means unsweetened baking chocolate grated from the block, not chips or cocoa powder. A quarter cupful grated is roughly 1 oz. Cocoa powder is not a substitute here — it absorbs liquid quite differently.
- Sultana raisinsGolden raisins. Toss them and the citron in a spoonful of the measured flour before folding in, or they sink to the bottom.
- Candied citron peelThe candied rind of the citron fruit, once a staple of fruitcake baking and now a specialty item around the winter holidays. Candied orange or lemon peel is the nearest substitute in the same quantity.
- Five eggsEgg sizes were not standardised in this period, so the modern equivalent is approximate. Five eggs against two cupfuls of flour will give a rich, close, near-pound-cake crumb; a dense result is not a sign the batter has gone wrong.
- YieldRoughly a 9x5 loaf or an 8-inch tube cake, twelve to sixteen slices. It keeps well wrapped for several days and improves on the second day.
A Calendar of Dinners was written by Marion Harris Neil and published by Procter & Gamble as promotional literature for Crisco, which had gone on sale in 1911 as the first widely marketed all-vegetable hydrogenated shortening. That explains why Crisco appears in a cake that would otherwise have called for butter, and why the quantities are given so briskly: the book's job was to prove the new fat could do everything lard and butter did, in dishes cooks already knew. The cake itself belongs to the long line of English-descended fruited pound cakes, with sultanas and candied citron standing in for the older, heavier plum-cake mixtures. The grated block chocolate is folded through rather than dissolved into the batter, one of several ways of chocolating a cake in the period.