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Almond and Citron Cake
1 cupful Crisco 2 cupfuls flour 1 cupful sugar 1 teaspoonful baking powder 5 eggs 1/4 teaspoonful powdered mace 1/2 lb. blanched chopped almonds 1½ wineglass brandy • ¼ lb. shredded candied citron peel 1 teaspoonful salt Cream Crisco and sugar thoroughly together, beat in yolks of eggs one by one, add almonds, citron, brandy, mace, flour, baking powder, salt, mix well and fold in whites of eggs beaten to a stiff froth. Turn into a papered cake pan and bake in a moderate oven for one hour. Cover with boiled frosting if liked.
Sufficient for one large cake.
A rich pound-cake batter leavened mostly by beaten egg whites, from the Crisco booklet's campaign to prove vegetable shortening could replace butter in fine baking. The measurements are period ones and need translating before you begin.
- Crisco and its stand-insOne cupful is 8 fluid ounces, roughly 7 oz by weight. Modern Crisco is no longer the same product as the 1913 original but creams in much the same way; unsalted butter works too, though it will brown more and taste less neutral.
- A wineglassIn this period a wineglass is about 2 fl oz, so 1½ wineglasses is roughly 3 fl oz (6 tablespoons) of brandy. That is a lot of liquid for two cups of flour, and it is what keeps the crumb moist.
- Citron peelThe text prints '14 lb.', almost certainly a mangled ¼ lb, i.e. about 4 oz shredded. Candied citron is still sold at holidays; candied lemon peel is the closest substitute, and mixed peel will do at some cost in flavour.
- Moderate ovenConventionally taken as about 350F (175C); the book gives no temperature. In a papered 9-inch round or an 8-inch square, an hour should be about right; a skewer should come out clean and the cake should have begun to pull from the sides.
- "Papered" panLine the base and sides with parchment rather than greasing alone. This is a heavy, sugary batter with fruit in it, and it sticks.
- Order of mixing mattersEverything heavy goes in before the whites, then the whites are folded last and gently. If you beat them in, the cake loses its only lift beyond the single teaspoon of baking powder and bakes dense.
- MaceGround mace, the outer coat of nutmeg, is milder and more floral than nutmeg itself. If you substitute nutmeg use a little less.
- YieldOne large cake, twelve to sixteen slices. It keeps well wrapped for several days and improves on the second.
The Story of Crisco (1913) was Procter & Gamble's book-length argument for hydrogenated cottonseed oil, published two years after the product's 1911 launch, and its recipe section is deliberately ambitious: not just biscuits and frying but the sort of celebration cakes a cook would otherwise have made with butter. An almond-and-citron cake belongs to the old English tradition of rich fruited pound cakes, where candied citron, brandy and blanched almonds signalled expense and keeping quality. Citron here is not the lemon but Citrus medica, a thick-rinded fruit grown chiefly for its peel, which was candied and shipped worldwide; it was a fixture of holiday baking well into the twentieth century and has since become a specialty item. Putting it in a shortening cake was the point of the exercise, a claim that the new fat could hold its own in the household's most prestigious baking.