Gennoise Cake
3/4 cupful flour 6 tablespoonfuls sugar 6 tablespoonfuls melted Crisco 4 eggs 1 teaspoonful baking powder 1/2 teaspoonful almond extract Boiled frosting Preserved cherries or cocoanut 1/4 teaspoonful salt Break eggs into bowl, add sugar and beat for ten minutes over a pan of boiling water. Remove from water and beat till mixture is thick and cold; remove beater, sift in flour, salt, and baking powder; mix carefully, add melted Crisco and almond extract. Turn at once into small square greased and papered tin and bake in a moderate oven twenty minutes. Turn out and remove paper. Cool and cut in eight square pieces. Cover with boiled frosting and decorate with cherries or cocoanut.
Sufficient for eight small cakes.
A genoise: the whole eggs are warmed and whipped to hold the air, and the fat goes in last. There is no chemical trickery to fall back on if the foam collapses, so the folding is the whole recipe.
- The hingeAdd the melted shortening in a thin stream down the side of the bowl, over about three additions, folding just until it disappears. Fat is what deflates an egg foam; poured in all at once it can knock much of the air out and leave a dense, rubbery slab.
- Warming the eggsThe bowl sits over, not in, boiling water. You want the egg and sugar around 110-120F, warm to a fingertip but never hot enough to set. Ten minutes is a hand-beater timing; a stand mixer will reach the ribbon stage in four or five, then needs a few more off the heat to cool.
- "Thick and cold"The test is the ribbon: lifted beaters should trail a band of batter that sits on the surface for a couple of seconds before sinking. Batter that is still warm will not hold the flour.
- CriscoVegetable shortening, and this book was written to sell it. Melted and cooled to barely warm, it behaves like any neutral oil here; melted butter gives more flavour and works the same way.
- OvenA moderate oven is usually taken as about 350F. Twenty minutes suits a thin sheet; the cake is done when the top springs back and the edges just begin to pull from the tin.
- The tin"Small square greased and papered" means a small square tin lined on the bottom with paper; the book gives no size. The batter makes a thin sheet, which is what yields eight small pieces rather than a layer cake.
- MeasuresSix tablespoons is 3/8 cup, so roughly 2 1/2 oz each of sugar and shortening against 3 1/4 oz flour. Cocoanut is shredded coconut; the preserved cherries are more likely candied or syrup-preserved than maraschino.
- Boiled frostingSugar syrup boiled to the soft-ball stage, about 238F, beaten into stiff egg whites. The hot syrup partly cooks the whites, and the frosting must be spread while still glossy or it sets in the bowl.
- YieldEight small squares, as stated. They stale quickly, as all genoise does; eat the day they are made or brush the cut cake with a little syrup.
Genoise is the French name for a whole-egg sponge, generally traced to Genoa and long treated in French pastry as the basic building block for layer cakes and petits fours, which is essentially what these frosted squares are. The spelling "Gennoise" and the appearance of baking powder in the batter both mark this as an American domestic adaptation rather than a professional formula; a pastry cook would rely on the egg foam alone. The recipe's real tell, though, is the Crisco: A Calendar of Dinners was written by Marion Harris Neil for Procter & Gamble in the 1910s, after Crisco's 1911 introduction, and hydrogenated vegetable shortening is substituted for butter or lard throughout, part of a campaign to persuade American cooks that the new fat could do everything the old ones did.