Hurry Up Cake
3/4 cupful sugar 1 1/2 cupfuls flour 4 tablespoonfuls Crisco 1/2 teaspoonful almond extract 1/2 teaspoonful lemon extract 2 whites of eggs 1/4 teaspoonful salt 2 teaspoonfuls baking powder Milk Sift flour, baking powder, salt and sugar into bowl. Put whites of eggs into measuring cup, add Crisco, and fill cup with milk. Add to dry mixture with extracts and beat vigorously six minutes. Pour into small Criscoed and floured cake tin and bake in moderate oven forty-five minutes. Cake may be frosted if liked.
Sufficient for one small cake.
A one-bowl white cake built around a single measuring cup, from one of the promotional cookbooks Procter & Gamble commissioned to teach cooks what to do with Crisco. A few of the instructions need translating.
- The measuring-cup trickThe cup is an 8-ounce cup, and everything liquid goes into it: two egg whites, then the 4 tablespoons (1/4 cup) of shortening, then milk poured in until the cup is full. Net effect is about 1 cup of combined liquid and fat, so the milk works out to roughly 1/3 to 1/2 cup depending on the size of your eggs.
- Moderate ovenIn period usage roughly 350-375F. Forty-five minutes looks long for a small single layer, so start testing at about 25 minutes unless you have used a deep, narrow tin.
- "Small cake tin"Probably something like an 8-inch round or a small loaf pan. The recipe makes one small cake, a single thin layer rather than a two-layer cake.
- Beat vigorously six minutesSix minutes assumes a wooden spoon or a hand beater. With a stand mixer on medium, two to three minutes is enough — the point is to emulsify the solid shortening into the liquid and develop enough structure to lift the batter, not to build gluten.
- CriscoStill sold, and still behaves as intended here, though it has been reformulated to remove partially hydrogenated fat. Butter can be substituted by weight, but it carries water and will give a denser, less cottony crumb; the whole design of this cake is the neutral, plastic fat.
- "Criscoed" tinSimply greased with shortening, then floured. Parchment in the base of the pan is more reliable for a lean white cake that has no butter to help it release.
- The extractsHalf a teaspoon each of almond and lemon is assertive by modern standards but characteristic of the period. Use ordinary supermarket almond extract, which is benzaldehyde-based; older recipes sometimes meant bitter almond oil, which is not the same thing.
- The leftover yolksTwo yolks are surplus. They keep a day or two covered in the refrigerator and go into custard, mayonnaise or a rich pastry.
A Calendar of Dinners was written by Marion Harris Neil for Procter & Gamble in the 1910s, shortly after Crisco went on sale in 1911, and its purpose was frankly commercial: the recipes are built around the new hydrogenated cottonseed shortening, and pans are "Criscoed" rather than greased. "Hurry Up Cake" — a recipe often associated with that book, though this page carries no source line — belongs to a family of early one-bowl cakes that abandoned the older discipline of creaming butter and sugar, then adding eggs, then flour and liquid in alternation — a sequence that existed because butter is temperamental and eggs curdle into it. A neutral, shelf-stable vegetable shortening made the shortcut possible, which is precisely the argument the book was written to make. The same logic runs forward through mid-century "quick-mix" cakes and eventually into boxed mixes; this recipe is an early, hand-beaten ancestor of them.