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For Filling (Teaspoonful Crisco cupful)
1 teaspoonful Crisco 1 cupful sugar 1 cupful water Pinch cream of tartar 1 teaspoonful vanilla extract 1 white of egg 1/2 cupful chopped cocoanut 1/4 teaspoonful salt For cake. Cream Crisco and sugar together, sift the flour, baking powder, and salt, and add alternately with the beaten yolks of eggs and milk. Beat thoroughly, then add stiffly beaten whites of eggs and flavoring and mix gently. Grease layer tins with Crisco, then flour them and divide mixture into three portions. Bake in a moderate oven twenty minutes. For filling. Boil water and sugar together, add Crisco and cream of tartar, and boil until it forms a soft ball when tried in cold water, or 240 Degree F. Beat white of egg to stiff froth, add salt, then pour in syrup gradually, add vanilla and beat until thick and cold. Spread on cake and sprinkle over with cocoanut.
Sufficient for three layers.
This is a boiled (Italian meringue) icing with a layer cake attached, printed as one entry. Note that the ingredient list covers only the filling — the cake's flour, butter, eggs, milk, baking powder and sugar quantities are not given on this page, so the cake method here is unusable on its own.
- The missing cake listThe method calls for flour, baking powder, salt, egg yolks, milk and stiffly beaten whites, but no amounts appear. Treat this page as a filling recipe and pair it with a standard three-layer white or sponge cake.
- CriscoCrisco is hydrogenated vegetable shortening, introduced in 1911 and still sold. The single teaspoonful in the filling may help keep the icing supple and discourage graining, though in a book published to sell Crisco its presence is at least as likely promotional; butter can be used in its place.
- Moderate ovenRoughly 350-375°F. Twenty minutes suits thin layers in three tins; check at fifteen.
- Soft ball, 240°FThis is the hinge. Use a thermometer rather than the cold-water test — a few degrees over and the icing sets hard and crumbly before you can spread it, a few under and it stays soupy. Do not stir the syrup once it boils.
- Cream of tartarA pinch inverts some of the sucrose and keeps the syrup from graining. Do not leave it out, and do not add more than a pinch or the icing will refuse to set.
- Pouring the syrupHave the white already at stiff froth before the syrup reaches temperature, then pour in a thin steady stream down the side of the bowl, missing the beaters. Beat until the bowl is cool to the hand — eight to ten minutes with a stand mixer — or the icing will slump off the layers.
- CocoanutThe recipe says only 'chopped cocoanut', which at the time would have meant fresh coconut or plain dried; use unsweetened rather than the sweetened flaked kind sold today, which will make an already very sweet icing cloying. Scatter it while the icing is still tacky so it adheres.
- WeatherBoiled icing is unreliable on a humid day; it draws moisture from the air and weeps. Make it in dry conditions and serve the cake the same day.
- YieldThe recipe says sufficient for three layers.
A Calendar of Dinners was written by Marion Harris Neil and published by Procter & Gamble to promote Crisco, which the company launched in 1911 as the first widely marketed hydrogenated vegetable shortening. That accounts for the teaspoonful of Crisco appearing in a boiled icing, where shortening does little that a small knob of butter would not do — the book's purpose was to demonstrate that the product belonged in every recipe in the house, greasing the tins included. The icing itself is the standard American boiled or "white mountain" frosting of the period: a hot sugar syrup beaten into egg white, the domestic counterpart of Italian meringue, which cooks could make without a thermometer by dropping syrup into cold water.