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For the Filling
1 cupful sugar 1/2 cupful boiling water 2 whites of eggs 1 teaspoonful vanilla extract Pinch cream of tartar 1/2 cupful chopped candied cherries 1/2 cupful chopped candied pineapple For cake. Cream Crisco and sugar together. Sift together three times dry ingredients and add alternately with water. Add vanilla, beat mixture well, then fold in stiffly beaten whites of eggs. Divide into two Criscoed and floured layer cake tins and bake in moderate oven twenty-five minutes. For filling. Put sugar and water into saucepan, stir till boiling, add cream of tartar, then boil until it forms a soft ball when tried in cold water, or 240 degree F.; pour on to the stiffly beaten whites of eggs, pouring in a steady stream and very slowly, adding while beating vanilla, cherries and pineapple, beat till thick and divide between and on top of cake. Sufficient for one large layer cake.
This is a boiled icing — Italian meringue with candied fruit folded in — plus the working method for the two-layer cake it dresses. Note that the ingredient list here covers only the filling; the cake's own quantities belong to the entry above it in the book.
- The missing half of the listThe instructions call for Crisco, sugar, dry ingredients, water, vanilla and egg whites for the cake, but only the filling is itemised on this page. Use any standard white layer cake (roughly 1/2 cup shortening, 1 1/2 cups sugar, 2 1/2 cups flour, 3 tsp baking powder, 1 cup water, 1 tsp vanilla, 3 egg whites) and follow the method as printed.
- The hinge: pour slowlyThe syrup must go onto the beating whites in a thin, steady stream down the side of the bowl. Dumped in, it cooks the whites into threads and the icing never thickens. A stand mixer on medium-high makes this straightforward.
- 240°F is not optionalThe book gives the number alongside the cold-water test; a thermometer is the easier of the two. Below about 238°F the icing stays soupy and weeps; above 245°F it sets hard and crumbly before you can spread it.
- Moderate ovenConventionally read as about 350°F; the book gives no figure. Twenty-five minutes suits two 8- or 9-inch layers; test at 22 minutes.
- Crisco and "Criscoed"The book was published to promote Crisco, so the fat is named as a verb. Modern vegetable shortening behaves the same way; butter gives more flavour but a slightly denser, less snow-white crumb.
- Cream of tartarAn acid, added to invert some of the sugar so the syrup resists crystallising. A pinch is about 1/8 teaspoon. Do not skip it or the icing may turn grainy as it cools.
- Candied cherries and pineappleStill sold, usually as glacé fruit around the winter holidays. Chop fine and pat dry — wet fruit will slacken the meringue. The printed method adds them while beating, with the vanilla; folding them in nearer the end, once the icing holds a peak, works as well.
- Weather mattersBoiled icing is hygroscopic and will stay tacky on a humid day. Frost the cake the day it is served; it does not keep well under a dome.
- YieldOne two-layer cake, 10 to 12 slices, filled and topped but not iced on the sides.
A Calendar of Dinners was written by Marion Harris Neil and issued by Procter & Gamble in the mid-1910s, a few years after Crisco was introduced — one of a wave of branded cookbooks that taught homemakers to use a new hydrogenated vegetable shortening in place of lard and butter. The filling itself is older than the book: boiled icings, in which hot sugar syrup is beaten into raw egg whites, were a fixture of American layer cakes, and the cold-water stages of sugar were standard matter in domestic-science teaching. Studding the meringue with glacé cherries and pineapple reflects the period's taste for candied fruit, and signalled a cake made for company rather than for every day.