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Everyday Cake
4 Tablespoonfuls Snowdrift 2/3 Cupful Sugar 1 Egg 1/2 Teaspoonful Desired Flavoring 1½ Cupfuls Flour ½ Teaspoonfuls Baking Powder 1/8 Teaspoonful Salt 1½ Cupful Milk Stir the Snowdrift, and gradually work in the sugar, flavoring and egg yolk, beaten.
Sift together the dry ingredients and add them alternately to this first mixture with the milk, then fold in the egg-white, beaten stiff. Transfer to a medium-sized cake-pan, which has been rubbed lightly with Snowdrift, and bake from thirty-five to forty minutes in a moderate oven, 350 degrees F. Cover with any desired icing.
A plain one-egg butter-style cake from a shortening manufacturer's booklet. Most of it translates directly, but one measurement in the ingredient list is clearly a misprint and needs judgment.
- The milk quantity is wrong as printed"1½ Cupful Milk" against 1½ cups flour would give a batter closer to crepe consistency. With 4 tablespoons fat, 2/3 cup sugar and one egg, the intended amount was probably ½ cup, possibly ¾. Add it gradually and stop when the batter drops thickly from the spoon.
- SnowdriftA cottonseed-oil shortening (hydrogenated in its later formulations), sold in tins and creamed like butter. Any modern vegetable shortening works measure for measure; unsalted butter also works, though the crumb will be slightly less tender.
- Baking powderThe printed page was checked, and the baking powder measure is what our text now gives. Use double-acting powder, the standard supermarket type for many decades now.
- FlourFlours of the period, especially Southern soft-wheat ones, were often softer than modern all-purpose. For a finer crumb, substitute cake flour, or replace two tablespoons of each cup of all-purpose with cornstarch.
- Pan"Medium-sized cake-pan" here means a single 8- or 9-inch round or square, greased only, not lined. A parchment round on the bottom saves trouble at turning out.
- Creaming"Stir the Snowdrift" means work it soft and smooth first, then beat in the sugar until light. Shortening holds air less readily than butter, so give it a few minutes; this cake has no other lift beyond the baking powder and the beaten white.
- Folding the whiteFold the stiff white in last with a light hand and stop while a few streaks remain. Overworking it knocks out the air and gives a denser, heavier crumb.
- Oven and donenessThe recipe usefully gives the number: 350°F. At 35 to 40 minutes a skewer should come out clean and the top spring back; a single 8-inch layer may be done nearer 30.
- YieldOne layer, about eight modest servings. The instruction to "cover with any desired icing" applies to that single cake; double the recipe if you want two layers.
This comes from a promotional cookbook for Snowdrift, a cottonseed-oil shortening marketed by the Southern Cotton Oil Company from the early years of the twentieth century. Cottonseed oil began as a by-product of the Southern cotton crop and, once refiners learned to deodorize and later to harden it, it was sold aggressively as a cheap, keeping, all-purpose replacement for lard and butter -- Snowdrift and Crisco being two of the best-advertised names. Booklets like this one existed to prove the point in the reader's own kitchen: the recipes are deliberately ordinary, the sort of everyday cake a cook already made with butter, rewritten so the brand name appears in the ingredient list and again in the instruction to grease the pan. The recipe gives both "moderate oven" and a Fahrenheit figure, a pairing typical of the years when thermostatically controlled gas and electric ranges were coming in alongside the older language of slow, moderate and quick ovens.