Home › A Calendar of Dinners › August 27
August 27
Menu: Steamed Clams; Vegetable Salad; Brown Bread Sandwiches; Peach Tapioca; Princess Cake; Coffee Princess Cake-Line small square cake tin with plain Crisco pastry. Sprinkle in 1/2 cup cleaned currants. Cream 1/2 cup Crisco with 1 cup sugar, then add 3 well beaten eggs, 3 cups flour, 1/2 teaspoons baking powder, and 1/2 teaspoon salt. Divide mixture into 2 portions. Add 1 tablespoon grated chocolate and 4 tablespoons milk to 1 portion. Put cake mixtures in spoonfuls on top of currants and bake in moderate oven for 35 minutes. Serve in square pieces.
A pastry-lined tray cake from Crisco's promotional dinner calendar, dated August 28. The printed quantities have suffered in transcription, so read the whole thing before you start and expect to add liquid to the plain half of the batter.
- The hinge: liquid balanceOnly the chocolate portion is given milk (4 tablespoons). Half of 3 cups flour with one and a half eggs' worth of egg and no liquid is a stiff paste, not a dropping batter. Add milk a tablespoon at a time to the plain half until it drops thickly from a spoon, so the two mixtures spread and meet in the oven.
- Baking powder amount"1/2 teaspoons baking powder" for 3 cups flour is almost certainly a dropped numeral for 1 1/2 or 2 1/2 teaspoons. Half a teaspoon will not lift this quantity of flour; assume the fraction is incomplete rather than trusting it.
- Moderate ovenAround 350F, though period 'moderate' is read anywhere from 350 to 375F. Thirty-five minutes suits a shallow square tin; the recipe says only 'small square cake tin', so judge by depth and test with a skewer in the centre, as the pastry base slows the bottom heat.
- Crisco and the pastryCrisco is a hydrogenated vegetable shortening, originally hydrogenated cottonseed oil; it is still sold, though reformulated since, so treat a modern tin as a near equivalent rather than an identical one. 'Plain Crisco pastry' is a shortcrust made with shortening rather than lard or butter; any short pastry crust works, and the method implies the tin is lined with raw pastry rather than blind-baked.
- Cleaned currants"Cleaned" means picked over for stalks and grit and rinsed, a real chore with early-century dried fruit. Modern packaged currants need only a rinse and a thorough drying, or they will steam the pastry.
- AssemblyThe currants sit directly on the raw pastry and the two batters are dropped over them in spoonfuls; the recipe does not specify alternating them, but dropping them side by side gives a two-tone top. Do not stir them together; the point is the contrast when it is cut.
- YieldA small square tin cut into squares gives roughly 9 to 16 pieces, depending on how large they are cut. The pastry base means it slices more cleanly cold.
The Story of Crisco (1913) was written to persuade American cooks to abandon lard and butter for Procter & Gamble's new hydrogenated cottonseed shortening, and its "Calendar of Dinners" gave dated menus across the year so that the product appeared in the reader's kitchen as routine rather than novelty. A pastry-lined cake baked in a square tin, dried fruit on the bottom, marbled batter above, belongs to the older tradition of tray cakes cut into squares for tea, and "Princess" was a stock genteel name attached to all manner of light cakes and pastries in Victorian and Edwardian cookery rather than a fixed formula. Chocolate here is "grated" because block baking chocolate, rather than cocoa powder or chips, was presumably the form to hand, though cocoa powder was also widely sold by 1913; a single tablespoon flavours and colours the batter faintly rather than making it a chocolate cake.