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Raisin Spice Cake
⅓ Cupful Snowdrift 1 Cupful Brown Sugar 1/3 Cupful Granulated Sugar 2 Eggs ½ Cupful Left-over Coffee 1¾ Cupfuls Flour 1 Cupful Raisins ⅛ Teaspoonful Salt 3 Teaspoonfuls Baking Powder ¾ Teaspoonful Cinnamon ¼ Teaspoonful Nutmeg ¼ Teaspoonful Clove Put all the ingredients together in a goodsized mixing bowl and beat them thoroughly, to make a smooth batter. Turn into a medium-sized dripping-pan, which has been rubbed with Snowdrift, and bake for forty-five minutes in a moderate oven, 350 degrees F. Cover with any desired icing. Or this may be baked in two layers, and put together and decorated with whipped and sweetened cream.
A one-bowl spice cake from a shortening manufacturer's booklet, built on cold leftover coffee instead of milk. The proportions as printed need a careful eye before you start creaming anything.
- SnowdriftA brand of hydrogenated cottonseed-oil shortening, a contemporary of Crisco and much the same sort of product as modern vegetable shortening. Substitute Crisco or any solid white shortening cup for cup; softened unsalted butter also works, though the crumb will be less tender and the flavour less neutral.
- The fat and liquid quantities do not balanceThe fat and liquid quantities look out of balance -- 1½ cups shortening and 1½ cups coffee against 1¾ cups flour is a great deal of both for that quantity of flour, and the batter is unlikely to behave. Cakes of this type generally run nearer ½ cup fat and ½ to ¾ cup liquid to 1¾ cups flour. Given that several other quantities in this text are plainly mangled, treat the printed 1½ figures as suspect rather than trusting them.
- Fractions to read carefullyThe flour is 1¾ cupfuls, the salt ⅛ teaspoonful, the cinnamon ¾ teaspoonful, and the nutmeg and clove ¼ teaspoonful each. Salt at ⅛ teaspoon is very light by current taste; ½ teaspoon suits unsalted butter or shortening.
- Left-over coffeePlain brewed black coffee, cold, and central to the recipe: it uses up what is standing and deepens the spice flavours. Brew fresh and cool it if you have none.
- OvenThe book gives the number itself: 350F. That still holds. Test with a skewer at 35 minutes in a sheet pan, sooner in layers.
- Dripping-panHere it means a shallow rectangular baking pan, not a roasting tin with a rack. A 9x13-inch pan is the closest modern equivalent; the two-layer version wants 8-inch round pans, baked about 25 to 30 minutes.
- RaisinsToss them in a spoonful of the measured flour before mixing so they do not sink. The all-in-one beating method here will otherwise drive them straight to the bottom.
- YieldA 9x13 pan cuts into 12 to 15 squares; the layer version serves 8 to 10. The whipped-cream finish must be refrigerated and eaten the same day.
A New Snowdrift Cook Book belongs to a genre that shaped American home baking as much as any general cookbook: the branded recipe booklet, issued cheaply or free by a manufacturer to teach cooks to use a new product. Snowdrift is generally described as a hydrogenated cottonseed-oil shortening, and booklets like this one had to persuade women who had baked with butter and lard that a bland white fat from a tin belonged in a cake. Hence the instruction to grease the pan with Snowdrift too -- every step advertises. The cake itself is a thrift recipe of a familiar type, using cold leftover coffee for liquid and a warm mix of cinnamon, nutmeg and clove with raisins; such spice cakes were popular partly because they kept well and partly because they needed no fresh milk. Coffee-and-raisin cakes of this shape appear widely in early twentieth-century American collections, often under names like boiled raisin cake or poor man's cake.