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For Chocolate Frosting
2 tablespoonfuls Crisco 2 squares melted bitter chocolate 2 cupfuls powdered sugar 6 tablespoonfuls coffee 1/4 teaspoonful salt 1/2 teaspoonful vanilla extract For cake. Cream Crisco; add sugar gradually, yolks of eggs well beaten, milk, flour, salt, baking powder, grated chocolate, citron, and raisins. Mix and beat two minutes, then fold in stiffly beaten whites of eggs. Turn into Criscoed and floured tin and bake for one and a quarter hours in a moderate oven. When cold cover with frosting.
For chocolate frosting. Knead Crisco into sugar. Melt chocolate, add coffee, sugar, salt, and Crisco, and stir until thick, then add vanilla and put away to cool. When cold spread on cake. This frosting may be used any time. It is just as good made one day and used the next by adding a little more hot coffee. It is always soft, creamy and delicious.
Sufficient for one cake.
The frosting here is complete and workable as written; the cake instructions that come with it are a method without its ingredient list, so treat the two halves differently.
- The cake list is missingThe directions call for eggs, milk, flour, baking powder, grated chocolate, citron and raisins, but no quantities appear on this page. Use the frosting on a chocolate cake you already trust rather than trying to reverse-engineer the batter.
- CriscoPlain vegetable shortening, which is what the book was written to sell. Two tablespoons is a small enough amount that unsalted butter substitutes cleanly and tastes better; the frosting will be very slightly softer at room temperature.
- Squares of chocolateA square is one ounce of unsweetened baking chocolate, so two squares is 2 oz. "Bitter" here means unsweetened, not bittersweet — using a 60% bar instead will make the frosting cloying against 2 cups of sugar.
- Powdered sugarConfectioners' sugar, about 8 oz. Period powdered sugar could be coarser and lumpier than the free-flowing sugar sold now, though cornstarch-cut sugar was already available by this date; sift it before kneading it into the fat.
- CoffeeSix tablespoons of brewed coffee, not grounds and not espresso. Add it hot to the melted chocolate so the mixture stays fluid while you work in the sugar.
- The hinge"Stir until thick" is a texture cue, not a temperature one: this is not a cooked icing and needs no thermometer, and the recipe sends it away to cool only after it has thickened. Spreading it while still warm and loose gives a glaze that runs off the cake.
- Moderate ovenRoughly 350°F, the usual modern reading of a period "moderate" oven, which ran somewhere around 350-375°F. An hour and a quarter at that heat suits a deep, fruited loaf-style cake, not a shallow layer.
- Reviving itThe note about a little more hot coffee the next day is sound. Beat it in a spoonful at a time until the frosting spreads again; too much at once and it thins past recovery.
- YieldEnough to cover the top and sides of one 8- or 9-inch cake, or the top of a 9x13 pan.
A Calendar of Dinners was written by Marion Harris Neil for Procter & Gamble, one of a group of cookbooks the company commissioned in the 1910s to persuade American cooks that Crisco — hydrogenated cottonseed oil, introduced in 1911 — could stand in for butter and lard in everything from pie crust to frosting. That explains why two tablespoons of shortening turn up in an icing where the sugar and chocolate are doing nearly all the work, and why the verb "Criscoed" appears where any other book would say "greased." Coffee is not a branded flourish: it appears as the liquid in other soft, uncooked chocolate icings of the period, and it was cheaper than cream and sharp enough to keep two cups of sugar from tasting flat, though how widespread the practice was is hard to document. The claim that the frosting keeps overnight and revives with hot coffee is the kind of practical reassurance these promotional books traded in.