Sand Cake
1 cupful Crisco 1 cupful sugar 1 teaspoonful salt 5 eggs 1/2 lb. cornstarch 1 teaspoonful lemon extract Cream the Crisco and salt, add sugar by tablespoonfuls, beating all the time, then add the yolks of the eggs each one separately, then add the cornstarch by tablespoonfuls, lemon extract and lastly whites of eggs beaten to a stiff froth. Turn into a papered cake tin and bake in moderate oven for three-quarters of an hour. Sufficient for one cake.
Lady Baltimore Cake (White Cake) 1 cupful sugar 3/4 cupful Crisco 1/2 cupful cold water 1 teaspoonful vanilla extract 2 1/2 cupfuls flour 2 1/2 teaspoonfuls baking powder 1/2 teaspoonful salt 6 whites of eggs
A cornstarch sponge with no leavening beyond beaten egg white, from one of Procter & Gamble's Crisco promotional books. The text runs straight into the start of the next recipe; everything from "Lady Baltimore Cake" onward belongs to a different cake.
- The hingeThere is no baking powder here. The only lift comes from the five egg whites, so they must be beaten to a genuinely stiff froth and folded in — not stirred — or the cake bakes to a dense, sandy brick.
- Moderate ovenThe book gives no temperatures; "moderate" is generally read as somewhere in the region of 350F. The recipe asks for three-quarters of an hour; test with a skewer a little before the time is up, since cornstarch batters dry out quickly once set.
- Half a pound of cornstarchWeigh it rather than measure it. Eight ounces is roughly 1 3/4 cups, and cornstarch packs and aerates unpredictably in a cup measure. There is no wheat flour at all, which is what gives the cake its characteristically short, fine, faintly gritty crumb — the "sand" of the name.
- CriscoThe book exists to sell it. Crisco is still sold and works as written; an equal weight of any solid vegetable shortening behaves the same. Butter will give better flavour but a slightly heavier cake, as it carries water that pure shortening does not.
- Creaming orderSugar by tablespoonfuls and yolks one at a time is not fussiness. With no flour gluten in the batter, a broken emulsion is hard to bring back, and the cake may weep fat in the oven.
- A papered tinLine the base and sides with parchment. A cornstarch cake is fragile hot and sticks readily; let it cool in the tin for ten minutes before turning out.
- Yield"Sufficient for one cake": an 8- or 9-inch round or a small loaf.
Sand cake is Sandtorte or Sandkuchen, a German and Austrian household cake built on cornstarch or potato starch instead of wheat flour, the starch giving the dry, sandy-textured crumb that names it. It travelled into American and British cookbooks through the nineteenth century and turns up regularly in early twentieth-century collections, usually as a plain keeping cake to serve with tea rather than anything iced or filled. Its appearance here is characteristic of the book: this is one of the Crisco cookery books Procter & Gamble issued, written by Marion Harris Neil, to promote Crisco, the hydrogenated cottonseed shortening the company launched in 1911, so the recipes call for Crisco where an older book would have said butter or lard. A cake with no butter, no milk and no wheat was a useful demonstration piece — it let the new fat carry the whole thing.