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Fruit Drop Cakes
1 cupful sugar 1/2 cupful Crisco 2 cupfuls flour 2 teaspoonfuls baking powder 1 teaspoonful salt 4 tablespoonfuls currants 4 tablespoonfuls chopped nut meats 2 tablespoonfuls chopped candied citron peel 3 eggs 2/3 cupful milk 1 teaspoonful vanilla extract Cream Crisco and sugar together, add yolks of eggs well beaten. Beat whites stiffly and add alternately with milk. Add sifted flour, baking powder and salt, then fruits, nuts and extract. Divide mixture into Criscoed and floured gem pans, and bake twenty minutes in moderate oven.
Sufficient for eighteen drop cakes.
A plain butter-cake batter dropped into muffin cups, stiffened with a little dried fruit and citron. Nothing here is difficult, but the mixing order is backwards from what most cooks expect and a few of the terms have shifted.
- The hinge: mix in the order givenThe beaten whites go in before the flour, alternating with the milk, which means they will deflate once the flour is worked through. Fold rather than beat from the moment the whites appear, and stop as soon as the flour disappears; overworking at that stage is what turns these dense and tough.
- Gem pansA gem pan is a muffin pan with small, deep cups, usually cast iron though tin ones were also sold; cups run roughly 2 to 2 1/2 inches across. A standard 12-cup muffin tin works, filled about two-thirds; the recipe's eighteen cakes means baking in two batches or using two pans.
- Moderate ovenRoughly 350F is the usual modern equivalent; period guidance for a moderate oven runs about 350 to 375F. Twenty minutes suits cakes this size; test with a skewer at eighteen minutes.
- CriscoThis book was published to promote Crisco, so shortening appears where an older cookbook would say butter or lard. Modern vegetable shortening is a close substitute, though today's product is reformulated and not the same partially hydrogenated cottonseed fat. Butter gives better flavour and slightly less lift; use the same half cup by volume.
- "Criscoed and floured"Greased and floured. Paper liners are simpler and give a cleaner release than greasing cast iron by hand.
- Currants and citronZante currants are the small dried grapes, not fresh red currants. Four tablespoons is about 1 1/2 ounces. Candied citron peel has become a specialty item; candied orange or lemon peel substitutes directly, and the two tablespoons here are a background note rather than a dominant flavour.
- The saltA full teaspoon in two cups of flour reads high by modern standards, and the fat called for here, Crisco, is unsalted. If you use salted butter, cut the salt to about half a teaspoon.
- YieldEighteen small cakes, best the day they are baked.
A Calendar of Dinners belongs to a genre that flourished in the early twentieth century: the cookbook issued by a manufacturer to teach cooks how to use a new product. Crisco, the hydrogenated cottonseed shortening introduced by Procter & Gamble in 1911, needed exactly this kind of promotion, because home bakers had no habit of reaching for it; they reached for butter, lard or drippings. So the recipes in the book, sweet and savoury alike, appear to be written around it, down to the instruction to "Crisco" the pans. The cake itself is unremarkable and that is rather the point: a standard creamed batter with currants, nuts and citron, baked in muffin pans and eaten at tea or breakfast rather than served as dessert. Candied citron, now nearly confined to fruitcake, was then a routine pantry item, and its presence marks these as a modest step above a plain muffin.