Marble Cake
2 cupfuls sugar 1 cupful Crisco 3 1/2 cupfuls flour 4 eggs 1 cupful milk 3 teaspoonfuls baking powder 2 tablespoonfuls molasses 2 tablespoonfuls melted chocolate 1 teaspoonful powdered cinnamon 1/2 teaspoonful grated nutmeg 1/2 teaspoonful powdered allspice 1 teaspoonful salt Cream Crisco, add gradually the sugar, yolks of eggs beaten until thick, flour, salt, baking powder, milk, and egg whites beaten to stiff froth. Mix carefully and to one-third the mixture add spices, molasses, and melted chocolate. Drop in Criscoed cake pan alternately a spoonful of each mixture, and draw spoon through once or twice to make colors lie in lines. Bake in moderately hot oven one hour.
Sufficient for one medium-sized cake.
A large butter-style cake in everything but the fat: this is a Crisco-era recipe, and the shortening is doing the work butter would. The method is straightforward creaming, with the batter split and one-third darkened.
- Oven temperature"Moderately hot" in this period is usually taken to mean somewhere around 375-400F, though usage varied from book to book. For a cake this size an hour at 350-375F is reasonable; check at 50 minutes with a skewer in the centre.
- Crisco, and what it means hereCrisco was new when this book was written and the book exists to sell it. A cup of modern vegetable shortening behaves the same way; a cup of softened unsalted butter also works and tastes better, though the crumb will be slightly less tender and the cake will brown faster.
- "Criscoed" panSimply greased with shortening. Grease and flour, or line the base with parchment. Use a 9- to 10-inch tube pan or two 9-inch round pans; the batter is roughly 3 1/2 pounds and will overflow a single 8-inch tin.
- Melted chocolateTwo tablespoons of melted unsweetened baking chocolate, about 1 ounce. Melt it and let it cool to barely warm before stirring it into the reserved batter, or it will begin to set the fat into specks.
- The order of mixingThe instruction is compressed. Cream the shortening, beat in the sugar, then the yolks; the original lists the flour, salt and baking powder and then the milk, though adding the sifted dry ingredients alternately with the milk is the usual modern handling; fold in the whipped whites last. Fold the whites in gently or the cake loses the lift they provide.
- MarblingAlternate spoonfuls, then draw a knife or skewer through in a single S-curve once or twice. Repeated stirring blends the two batters into a uniform brown and the pattern disappears.
- MolassesUse unsulphured molasses, not blackstrap, which is far more bitter than what was sold as cooking molasses in 1915.
- YieldThe recipe calls it one medium-sized cake; expect roughly 12 to 16 slices. It keeps well wrapped for three or four days; shortening-based cakes are generally reckoned to stale more slowly than butter ones.
Marble cake belongs to the German-American baking tradition, generally traced to Marmorkuchen, and it appears in American cookbooks from the later nineteenth century onward, usually as a light batter marbled with a dark one. Older versions commonly used molasses and spices for the dark portion; this recipe keeps the molasses and spice but adds two tablespoons of chocolate. The Crisco throughout is the giveaway to the book's purpose: A Calendar of Dinners was a promotional cookbook built around Procter & Gamble's hydrogenated cottonseed shortening, introduced in 1911, and its recipes call for the new fat in place of butter or lard as a matter of course.