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Tilden Cake
Cream 3/4 cup Crisco with 1 1/2 cups sugar, add 4 well beaten eggs, 1 cup milk, sift in 3 cups flour, 3/4 teaspoon salt, 1/2 cup cornstarch, 2 teaspoons baking powder, and add 2 teaspoons lemon extract. Turn into Criscoed and floured cake tin and bake for 1 1/2 hours in moderate oven.
A large plain butter-style cake from a Crisco-era household book, built on the pound-cake ratio and softened with cornstarch. The batter is stiff and the bake is long, so pan choice decides whether it works.
- Moderate ovenSet 350F. If the batter goes into a single deep pan, 325F is safer over an hour and a half; the outside will otherwise be dark before the centre sets.
- CriscoPlain hydrogenated vegetable shortening, and the book exists partly to sell it. Modern all-vegetable shortening behaves much the same, though it has been reformulated since. Butter can be substituted cup for cup, but it carries water and salt, so the crumb will be less tender and browner and the flavour quite different.
- "Criscoed and floured"Simply greased with shortening and dusted with flour. A tube or bundt pan gives the heat a path to the middle of a batter this heavy.
- The cornstarchHalf a cup of cornstarch with three cups of flour is a homemade cake flour: the starch dilutes the gluten and gives a finer, more tender crumb. Do not leave it out and add more flour, or the cake turns tough and bready.
- Mixing order mattersFour eggs and a cup of milk poured into a creamed shortening mixture will look curdled. Add the eggs a little at a time, then alternate the sifted dry ingredients with the milk, ending with dry, and stop as soon as it comes together.
- Pan size and timingSomething like six to seven cups of batter: enough for one 10-inch tube pan, or divided between loaf pans if you watch the depth. Loaves are done in 55 to 70 minutes. Test with a skewer, or take the centre to about 205F rather than trusting the hour and a half.
- Lemon extractTwo teaspoons is the recipe's only flavouring. If your extract is a strong one, one to one and a half teaspoons, or the zest of a lemon plus a teaspoon of extract, may read better now.
- YieldA generous cake, 12 to 16 slices. It keeps several days wrapped and is better on the second day.
This comes from Marion Harris Neil's A Calendar of Dinners, one of the promotional cookbooks the Procter & Gamble company published after Crisco appeared in 1911 — the recipes call for the new shortening, and the constant "Criscoed" pans are advertising doing double duty as instruction. The cake itself is a plain American loaf or tube cake, lightened with baking powder and cornstarch rather than beaten eggs alone. Cakes named for public figures were a nineteenth-century habit, and the name is generally linked to Samuel J. Tilden, the New York governor who won the popular vote in 1876 and lost the presidency; that attribution is traditional rather than documented.