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Washington Pie
3/4 cup sugar, 1 tablespoon Crisco; beat together thoroughly; add 1/2 cup sweet milk, 2 cups flour, 2 beaten eggs, 2 teaspoons baking powder, 1 teaspoon lemon; make into 3 cakes and put jelly or custard between.
A plain layer cake baked in pie tins, written in the compressed shorthand of a 1910s promotional cookbook — no pan size, no oven temperature, no baking time. Here is what the original assumes you already know.
- The batter is stiff by designThe batter is thick -- Three-quarters of a cup of sugar and one tablespoon of shortening against two cups of flour, half a cup of milk and two eggs gives a batter stiffer than most modern cake batters; it will likely need spreading into the pans rather than pouring.
- CriscoCrisco was then a new all-vegetable shortening, and recipes naming it often appeared in material published to promote it. Any solid vegetable shortening works; butter gives more flavour but slightly less tenderness at this very low fat level.
- Sweet milkSimply fresh whole milk, specified to distinguish it from the sour milk or buttermilk that older recipes used with saleratus. Substituting buttermilk would mean adjusting the leavening.
- 1 teaspoon lemonAlmost certainly lemon extract rather than juice or zest. A teaspoon of extract is assertive by modern standards; half a teaspoon, or the grated zest of one lemon, suits current palates better.
- Pans and oven"Three cakes" means three thin layers, traditionally baked in pie tins, which is why such cakes were called pies; 8- or 9-inch rounds will do. The original gives no temperature or time; roughly 375F for 12 to 18 minutes is a modern reconstruction, and thin layers colour and dry quickly, so check early.
- AssemblyFill while the layers are completely cool, with a thick raspberry or currant jelly or a cooked pastry cream. Custard-filled cake must be refrigerated and eaten within a day or two.
- Finishing and yieldThe top is normally left bare or dusted with confectioners' sugar rather than iced. Three 8-inch layers give 8 to 10 servings.
Washington Pie is a New England cake that is not a pie at all: thin layers of plain butter or shortening cake baked in pie tins and sandwiched with jam, then cut in wedges like a pie. It is the direct sibling of Boston cream pie, which uses the same layers with custard instead of jelly "u2014 and this recipe hedges by offering either filling. The name is generally traced to the vogue for attaching George Washington to plain, virtuous American cookery in the nineteenth century rather than to any documented connection with him. The instruction to beat one tablespoon of Crisco with the sugar marks the moment when branded vegetable shortening was pushing into territory that butter and lard had held.