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August 12
Menu: Broiled Ham; Baked Potatoes Green Corn Custard; Apple Salad Grape Juice Syllabub; Tilden Cake; Coffee Tilden Cake-Cream 3/4 cup Crisco with 1½ cups sugar, add 4 well beaten eggs, 1 cup milk, sift in 3 cups flour, 3/4 teaspoon salt, 1/2 cup cornstarch, 2 teaspoons baking powder, and add 2 teaspoons lemon extract. Turn into Criscoed and. floured cake tin and bake for 1½ hours in moderate oven.
A creamed butter-cake in the pound-cake tradition, printed as one line inside a day's dinner menu. The proportions are sound; the oven time is the thing to distrust.
- CriscoCrisco is vegetable shortening, and in 1913 it meant hydrogenated cottonseed oil. Modern shortening behaves the same way in a creamed cake; unsalted butter also works, though the crumb will be slightly denser and the flavour less neutral.
- "Criscoed and floured"Simply greased with shortening and dusted with flour. A parchment round in the base of the pan saves the cake, since this batter is heavy and clings.
- Moderate oven350F. For a cake this size 325F is the safer reading, since ninety minutes at 350F will dry the edges before the centre sets.
- The time is too longA cake of this size needs roughly 55 to 70 minutes. Start testing at 50 minutes with a skewer in the thickest part; the original 1½ hours may reflect a cooler, slower range-oven.
- Pan sizeNo tin is specified. Use a 10-inch tube pan or two 9x5-inch loaf pans; the batter comes to about 8 cups and will overflow a single 9-inch round.
- Cornstarch with the flourThe half cup of cornstarch dilutes the flour's gluten and gives the fine, tender crumb these "velvet" cakes were prized for. Sift it with the flour, salt and baking powder rather than adding it separately, or it streaks.
- Flour measurementSift first, then spoon into the cup and level. Scooping straight from the bag can pack in appreciably more flour than sifted measure and gives a tough cake.
- Lemon extractTwo teaspoons may read sharp with a modern concentrated extract; one teaspoon, or the zest of a lemon, is closer to a mild perfume.
- YieldOne large cake, 12 to 16 slices. It keeps four or five days well wrapped and slices better on the second day.
This appears in the "Calendar of Dinners" section of The Story of Crisco (1913), Procter & Gamble's promotional cookbook written with Marion Harris Neil, issued to teach American cooks what to do with the new hydrogenated shortening the company had launched two years earlier. That commercial purpose explains the odd verb "Criscoed" and the way the trade name stands in for both fat and method. The cake itself belongs to a long American habit of attaching statesmen's names to rich creamed cakes -- Tilden is generally taken to be Samuel J. Tilden, the New York governor who won the popular vote in 1876, though the attribution is traditional rather than documented, and by 1913 the name survived mainly as a recipe title. The formula, with its cornstarch and lemon extract, is a plain butter cake in the pound-cake line, of the sort meant to be sliced beside the coffee at the end of a long summer dinner, which is where the menu places it.