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For Lemon Filling
4 tablespoonfuls Crisco 2 lemons 3/4 cupful sugar 4 yolks of eggs 1 white of egg 1/4 teaspoonful salt For cake. Put the eggs, sugar, and lemon rind into basin, stand it over pan of boiling water, and beat until warm; then remove from hot water, and continue beating until mixture is stiff and cold; then add flour mixed with baking powder and salt, and pass through sieve, add Crisco melted but cool, taking care to stir very gently, but on no account beat it. Divide mixture into two small Criscoed and floured layer cake tins, and bake ten minutes in moderately hot oven. Turn out and cool, then put together with lemon filling. For filling. Beat up eggs in saucepan, add Crisco, salt, grated rinds and strained lemon juice. Stir with wooden spoon over gentle heat until mixture just comes to boiling point. When cold use.
Sufficient for one layer cake.
Two recipes have been run together here: a hot-whisked sponge and the lemon filling that goes between its layers. The ingredient list at the top belongs to the filling only, so the cake half has to be reconstructed from a standard genoise.
- The list is the filling, not the cakeEverything named — 4 tablespoons Crisco, 2 lemons, 3/4 cup sugar, 4 yolks, 1 white, 1/4 teaspoon salt — corresponds to the saucepan filling, though the filling method does not mention the sugar. No cake quantities (eggs, sugar, flour, baking powder) are given at all, whether by printer's omission or otherwise; any standard hot-whisked sponge or genoise will fill the gap.
- CriscoThe book is a Crisco promotional volume, so the shortening appears where an English cook would have used butter. Butter is the better choice in both halves, and in the filling it is what makes it taste like lemon curd.
- "Moderately hot oven"375-400F. Thin layers in shallow tins need the upper end of that and are done in about ten minutes, when the surface springs back and the edges just pull from the tin.
- The hinge: do not let the filling boil"Just comes to boiling point" is pushing it. Yolks begin to set in roughly the 160-170F range and can curdle if driven much past about 180F, though the sugar and acid here give some margin; take the pan off when the mixture coats the spoon and holds a line drawn through it. Low heat, constant stirring, and a heavy pan or a bowl over simmering water.
- Beating the spongeThe eggs and sugar are warmed over water only to help them take up air — around 110F, no hotter. Beat until the mixture falls in a thick ribbon, then fold in the sifted flour and the cooled melted fat with a spatula. The instruction "on no account beat it" is there to protect the air already beaten in, which is what lifts the cake.
- Lemon rindGrate only the yellow zest; the white pith is bitter. In the cake the zest is warmed with the eggs and sugar; in the filling the recipe adds the rinds after the eggs are beaten up with the Crisco and salt, and the strained juice with them.
- Yield and keepingThe recipe says only 'sufficient for one layer cake', the tins being described as small. Because it is egg-thickened, refrigerate the filled cake and eat it within two or three days.
A Calendar of Dinners was written by Marion Harris Neil for Procter & Gamble, which is why vegetable shortening turns up in a sponge cake and in a lemon curd. Crisco reached American kitchens in 1911, and the company's strategy was to commission whole recipe books in which it quietly replaced butter, lard and suet throughout — the word "Criscoed" for greasing a tin is often said to be a house coinage of exactly that campaign. The filling itself is lemon curd, a preparation generally traced to English kitchens of the earlier nineteenth century, where it was made with butter and served with bread or in tarts before it became a standard layer-cake filling. The cake is a genoise, raised by air beaten into warmed eggs rather than by chemical leavening, though the baking powder in the method shows the recipe hedging its bets.