Lunch Cakes
1 scant cupful sugar 6 tablespoonfuls Crisco 1 cupful milk 2 eggs 2 cupfuls flour 3 teaspoonfuls baking powder 1 teaspoonful salt 1 teaspoonful vanilla extract Cream Crisco and sugar together, then add well beaten eggs. Sift dry ingredients, and add to first mixture alternately with milk. Divide into Criscoed and floured gem pans and bake in moderately hot oven fifteen minutes. Sufficient for fifteen cakes.
A plain cupcake batter of the sort that filled lunch pails a century ago, written to sell shortening. It works as printed; only the vessels and the oven language need translating.
- Gem pansGem pans are cast-iron muffin pans with small, deep cups; sizes varied, but many are reasonably close to a modern standard muffin tin. Fifteen cakes from this batter means filling the cups about two-thirds full, so a 12-cup tin plus three more, or two tins run at once.
- Moderately hot ovenRead this as 375-400F. At that heat fifteen minutes is right for cakes this size; test with a skewer at twelve minutes.
- CriscoThe book was published to promote Crisco, and the fat appears in nearly every recipe. Six tablespoons of any solid vegetable shortening behaves the same way; the same volume of softened butter gives more flavour and a slightly denser crumb.
- "Criscoed and floured"Simply greased and floured. Paper liners do the job with less trouble, though the cakes will not take on the thin crisp edge that a greased iron cup gives.
- A scant cupfulSlightly less than a full cup, so about 3/4 cup plus 2 tablespoons of sugar. Period cup measures were dipped and levelled rather than weighed, so small variation here is expected and harmless.
- The saltA full teaspoon is high by current standards, especially alongside baking powder that already contains sodium. Half a teaspoon suits most palates unless you are using unsalted butter in place of the shortening.
- MixingAdding the dry ingredients and milk alternately is the whole method: it keeps the batter from breaking and limits gluten development. Stop as soon as the flour disappears, or the cakes turn tough and tunnelled.
"Lunch cakes" is a description of purpose rather than a dish name -- small, unfrosted, sturdy cakes meant to travel in a lunch box or sit on the tea table, as distinct from the layer cakes that needed a plate and a fork. The recipe comes from one of the cookbooks Procter & Gamble commissioned after Crisco was introduced in 1911, a genre in which every recipe is also an advertisement; the verb "to Crisco" a pan, used here as if it were ordinary English, shows how hard the campaign pushed. Hydrogenated vegetable shortening was sold on being cheaper and more stable than butter and free of the religious and dietary objections attached to lard, and books like this one existed to teach cooks that it could simply be substituted wherever a solid fat was called for. The gem pan named in the instructions was standard equipment by then, a heavy cast-iron plate of small cups that had been in American kitchens since the mid-nineteenth century.