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Rose Leaf Cakes
1 cupful rose leaves 3 cupfuls flour 1 cupful sugar 1/2 cupful Crisco 3 eggs 1 cupful milk 2 teaspoonfuls baking powder 1 lemon 1/2 teaspoonful salt Cream Crisco and sugar thoroughly together, then add eggs well beaten, flour, baking powder, salt, milk, grated rind and 1 tablespoonful lemon juice, and fresh rose leaves. Divide into Criscoed and floured gem pans and bake in moderate oven from twelve to fifteen minutes.
Sufficient for thirty-five cakes.
A Crisco-era cupcake batter scented with rose petals. Almost everything here translates directly; the two things to sort out are what "rose leaves" means and what a gem pan is.
- Rose leaves means petalsNineteenth- and early twentieth-century cookbooks use "rose leaves" for the petals of the flower, not the foliage. Pull the petals from freshly opened, strongly scented roses and snip away the pale bitter heel at the base of each one before chopping them coarsely.
- Which rosesUse roses you know have not been sprayed — garden or farmers' market, never florist stock, which is routinely treated with fungicides and pesticides not approved for food. Old damask and rugosa types carry the most perfume; many modern hybrid teas have almost none, and the cakes will taste of nothing but lemon.
- Gem pansA gem pan is a cast-iron muffin pan with small, deep cups. Small muffin or gem cups holding two to three tablespoons of batter are the closest match to the stated count; regular 12-cup muffin tins can be used, but the batter will fill more than one and the cakes will likely need longer than the stated time.
- Moderate ovenConventionally taken as somewhere around 350-375F; the book itself gives no temperatures. The short 12 to 15 minutes assumes the small gem cups — test with a skewer rather than trusting the clock.
- Crisco and "Criscoed"Half a cup of any solid vegetable shortening; the book is a Crisco advertisement, so the brand appears as both noun and verb. "Criscoed and floured" simply means greased and floured. Butter can be substituted at the same weight for better flavour, though the crumb will be slightly firmer.
- Order of mixingAs written, flour and milk go in together in one list. Add them alternately, flour first and last, in three or four additions, to keep the batter from breaking.
- LemonOne lemon supplies the grated rind, but only a tablespoon of the juice is used. Zest before juicing and keep the rest for something else.
- YieldThirty-five cakes implies small cups taking roughly two to three tablespoons of batter each. In standard cupcake cups expect around 18.
A Calendar of Dinners was written by Marion Harris Neil and published by Procter & Gamble to promote Crisco, the hydrogenated cottonseed shortening the company had introduced in 1911 — which is why every recipe in it creams Crisco, greases its pans with Crisco, and even uses the word as a verb. Cooking with rose petals long predates the shortening: rose water and candied or pounded petals were standard flavourings in English cookery from the medieval period onward, and rose water appears alongside orange-flower water in eighteenth-century recipe books. Fresh petals in a cake batter, as here, belong to a later and more domestic end of that tradition, in a period when American cookbooks show a taste for edible-flower touches in tea-table and "dainty" refreshments. The lemon is doing real work — rose flavour is fugitive and fades in the oven, and the acid and zest keep the cakes from tasting merely floral.