Marmalade Cake
1/2 cupful sugar 1/2 cupful Crisco 1 cupful marmalade 1 1/2 teaspoonfuls baking powder 1/2 teaspoonful salt 1 egg 2 cupfuls flour 1/2 teaspoonful powdered ginger Sift salt, flour, and baking powder into basin, rub in Crisco with finger tips, add ginger and egg well beaten. Knead lightly to smooth paste and divide into two pieces. Roll out pieces and line Criscoed dinner plate with one of them. Spread over with marmalade, cover with remaining piece of paste, pinch neatly round the edges and bake in moderate oven half an hour. Cut like pie and serve hot or cold.
Sufficient for eight pieces.
A rubbed-in pastry with a marmalade filling, baked flat on a plate and cut in wedges — closer to an English jam tart than to a cake in the American sense. It comes together in minutes, but the written method has one gap worth catching before you start.
- The missing sugarSugar is in the ingredient list but never appears in the instructions. Sift it in with the flour, salt and baking powder. Without it the paste is bland against the marmalade, which is doing all the sweetening on its own.
- CriscoPlain vegetable shortening, still sold under the same name and essentially interchangeable with what the book means. This is a Crisco-sponsored cookbook, hence the branding; an equal weight of butter or lard makes a better-flavoured paste, though the crumb will be slightly less short.
- Moderate oven350F. Half an hour at that temperature gives a pale gold crust; if you want more colour, go to 375F and check at 25 minutes.
- The dinner plateBaking on an ovenproof plate was common practice in household cookery of the period. A 9-inch pie plate or a shallow tart tin does the same job. Grease it well — the marmalade will find any gap and weld itself to the dish.
- Seal the edge properlyThis is the hinge. Marmalade thins and boils as it heats, so leave a half-inch clear border, dampen it, and press the two rounds together firmly. A vent or two cut in the lid stops the top from lifting off in one piece.
- Handling the paste"Knead lightly to smooth paste" means exactly that — this is baking-powder pastry, not bread dough, and overworking it makes it tough. If it will not come together, a teaspoon or two of cold water or milk is all it needs; the recipe assumes the egg supplies the liquid.
- MarmaladeThe recipe says only 'marmalade'; a thick-cut bitter orange marmalade is the likeliest reading. A loose or runny modern conserve will soak the base; drain it or cook it down for a minute or two first.
- YieldEight wedges, as stated. Best the day it is made — the base softens by the second day, though a few minutes in a 325F oven revives it.
A Calendar of Dinners was written by Marion Harris Neil and published by Procter & Gamble to promote Crisco, which had been introduced only a few years earlier as a shelf-stable substitute for lard and butter. The recipes are built around the product, and the verb "Criscoed" for greasing a tin, as here, is the house style. The dish itself is not American in origin: a rubbed-in paste enclosing jam and baked flat on a plate is a long-standing British household sweet, the sort of thing sometimes called a jam tart or a marmalade plate pie. Thick Seville orange marmalade of the familiar kind is usually associated with Scottish commercial production from the late eighteenth century, though preserves called marmalade are considerably older.