Jelly Roll
4 eggs 1 cupful sugar 2 tablespoonfuls melted Crisco 2 cupfuls flour 1 teaspoonful baking powder 1/4 teaspoonful salt 4 tablespoonfuls milk Jelly or preserves 1 teaspoonful lemon extract Beat eggs and sugar together twenty minutes, remove beater, sift in flour, salt, and baking powder, add milk, extract, and melted Crisco. Grease large flat tin with Crisco, dust over with flour, pour in mixture and spread out evenly. Bake twelve minutes in moderately hot oven. Turn out on sugared paper, spread quickly with jelly or preserve and roll up at once. The cake will crack if spreading and rolling are not quickly done. Sliced jelly roll is delicious with custard.
Sufficient for one jelly roll.
A promotional-era sponge roll that depends almost entirely on speed at the end. Everything else is negotiable; the rolling is not.
- Roll it hotThe cake must come out of the pan, be spread and be rolled within a minute or two, while still steam-soft. A sponge that has cooled even to warm will split along every crack, exactly as the original warns.
- "Moderately hot oven"Read that as 375-400F. A thin sheet of sponge in twelve minutes wants real heat; too low and it dries out before it colours.
- The panA "large flat tin" here is a jelly-roll or quarter-to-half sheet pan, roughly 10 x 15 inches with a shallow rim. Grease and flour as directed, or line with parchment, which makes the turn-out surer.
- CriscoThe book was written to sell it. Any neutral solid shortening works, and melted butter gives better flavour at the same volume.
- Twenty minutes of beatingThat is a hand-beater instruction. In a stand mixer, whip the eggs and sugar on high for 5-8 minutes, until pale, tripled and thick enough to ribbon off the whisk. This aeration does most of the leavening, alongside the teaspoon of baking powder.
- The flour is heavy by modern standardsTwo cups of flour to four eggs and four tablespoons of milk gives a stiff batter that must be spread rather than poured. Many later sponge-roll recipes use about a cup. If you follow it as written, expect a firmer, more cake-like roll and spread it into the corners with an offset spatula.
- Sugared paperA sheet of parchment or a clean tea towel dusted generously with granulated or caster sugar. The sugar keeps the surface from sticking and from sealing itself shut as it cools.
- The jellyStir it loose first, or warm it briefly. Cold set preserve dragged across hot sponge tears it. Trim the crisp edges before rolling if they look brittle.
- YieldOne roll, about 8 to 10 slices. The suggestion of serving slices with custard is worth taking.
A Calendar of Dinners belongs to a specific commercial moment: Procter & Gamble launched Crisco in 1911, and the company distributed recipe books, this one credited to Marion Harris Neil, in which recipes called for Crisco instead of butter or lard. The jelly roll itself is much older than the shortening, an American name for the rolled sponge the British call a Swiss roll, and it belongs to the same nineteenth-century fashion as "jelly cake", thin layers stacked with preserve between. Rolling rather than stacking gets the same effect from one sheet of batter and one baking. The two tablespoons of melted fat matter less to the cake than the twenty minutes of beating; the structure rests largely on whipped egg, helped by the teaspoon of baking powder, and Crisco is along mostly for the greased tin and the sponsor's sake.