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Fruit Layer Cake
1/3 cup shortening 1 cup sugar 1 egg 1 teaspoon vanilla extract 1 cup milk 2 cups flour 4 teaspoons Royal Baking Powder Cream shortening well; add sugar; add yolk of egg and vanilla; mix well; add milk, then flour and baking powder which have been sifted together; mix in beaten white of egg. Bake in three greased layer tins in quick oven about 15 minutes. Put cake together with fruit filling and cover with white icing.
A plain one-egg layer cake built to show off a baking powder brand, which explains both the leavening and the terse instructions. A few things need translating before it behaves in a modern oven.
- Quick ovenPeriod guides vary, but a quick oven is usually given as somewhere around 400-425F, hot enough to scorch thin layers in a modern range with its steadier, drier heat. 375-400F, checked at 12 minutes, is a safer modern equivalent for a 15-minute layer.
- The baking powder is highFour teaspoons to two cups of flour is roughly double what current double-acting powder requires; the single-acting cream-of-tartar powders of the day acted only once, on wetting, which may account for some of it. Two to two and a half teaspoons will give a comparable rise with a finer, less crumbly grain.
- ShorteningMeans any solid fat: butter, lard, or hydrogenated vegetable shortening. Butter gives the better flavour, vegetable shortening the higher, softer crumb. 1/3 cup is about 75 g.
- No saltThe recipe includes none. Add 1/4 teaspoon with the flour, particularly if you use unsalted fat, or the cake tastes flat.
- The separated eggThe hinge of the method. The yolk goes in with the creamed fat, the white is beaten and folded last. Fold it in, do not beat it in, or the single egg's worth of aeration is lost and the layers bake dense.
- Layer tinsThree tins means three thin layers; 8- or 9-inch rounds are the likely size, though the recipe does not say. Grease and line the bases with parchment. Baked in two 8-inch tins instead, allow roughly 20-25 minutes.
- Fruit fillingLeft undefined, presumably because the book carries its own filling recipes. Cooked fillings of chopped raisins, figs or dates with sugar and a little water or citrus juice were typical of the period; spread while the layers are cold.
- YieldA three-layer 8-inch cake, twelve to sixteen slices. It stales quickly, being lean in fat and eggs; it is at its best the day it is made.
The New Royal Cook Book belongs to a genre that had long dominated American home baking: the free or near-free recipe booklet issued by a manufacturer, in this case the Royal Baking Powder Company, whose cream-of-tartar formula competed hard against cheaper alum-based rivals. Recipes in such a book typically name the brand in the ingredient list and tend to call for a generous hand with it. The cake itself is a workhorse of the period, a one-egg layer cake sometimes called a plain cake, cheap enough for a weekday and dressed up for company with whatever filling the pantry allowed. Fruit fillings of chopped raisins or figs cooked down with sugar were the standard answer before commercial jams and canned fillings became household staples, and the white boiled icing that finished it was the default celebration frosting of American kitchens well into the twentieth century.