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Boiling Water Cake
1 cupful boiling water 1 cupful sultana raisins 1 cupful sugar 2½ cupfuls flour ½ cupful Crisco ½ teaspoonful salt 1 egg 2 teaspoonfuls baking powder 1/4 cupful chopped candied 1/4 teaspoonful grated nutmeg citron peel ½ teaspoonful lemon extract Put Crisco and sugar into basin, pour boiling water over them; let stand till cold, then add egg well beaten, sift in flour, salt, baking powder, and nutmeg, add peel, raisins, and lemon extract, and mix well. Turn into greased and floured small square tin and bake in moderate oven half hour. Cool and cover with boiled frosting.
Sufficient for one small cake.
A plain fruited cake from the Crisco promotional book of 1913, built on the trick of melting the fat with boiling water rather than creaming it. A few of the quantities as printed are clearly scrambled by the typesetting of the ingredient columns, so read them with judgement.
- The fractions and the merged listThe fat, salt, and lemon extract read ½ cupful Crisco, ½ teaspoonful salt, and ½ teaspoonful lemon extract, which is what the printed page gives and what our text now shows. The ingredient list still runs together because the original was set in two columns, so the chopped candied citron peel appears split across two lines.
- Why the boiling waterPouring boiling water over solid shortening and sugar melts the fat and dissolves the sugar in one step, replacing creaming. The mixture must be fully cold before the egg goes in, or the egg will scramble in it. This is the hinge of the method and the reason the cake is named as it is.
- Moderate ovenConventionally read as about 350°F. Half an hour suits a small square tin; the recipe gives no dimension, but something around 8 inches is a reasonable assumption. Test with a skewer at 25 minutes.
- CriscoThe book exists to sell it, and the modern product is still an all-vegetable solid shortening, though reformulated to remove partially hydrogenated oils. Butter can be substituted by weight, but the crumb will be less tender and the flavour quite different from what the author intended.
- Sultana raisins and citron peelSultanas are golden raisins. Candied citron is the thick-cut, pale green peel of the citron fruit, still sold around the winter holidays; mixed candied peel is the usual stand-in. Toss the fruit in a spoonful of the measured flour so it does not sink.
- Boiled frostingThe period term for a frosting made by beating a hot sugar syrup into egg white until it holds a gloss, essentially what is now called Italian meringue; the closely related seven-minute frosting is cooked over hot water instead. The cake must be entirely cold or the frosting will slump.
- YieldOne small square cake; the recipe gives no tin size, but about nine to twelve pieces if baked in an 8-inch square. It keeps well for several days, the fruit and fat working in its favour.
The Story of Crisco (1913) was published by Procter & Gamble to teach American cooks what to do with a fat that had no precedent in their kitchens: a solid, white, shelf-stable vegetable shortening introduced in 1911, neither butter nor lard. Much of the book's work is reassurance by demonstration, running Crisco through the whole familiar repertoire — pastry, frying, cakes — to show it behaves. Boiling-water cakes belong to a broader family of thrifty melted-fat cakes that avoid creaming altogether, a real advantage before electric mixers when a stiff fat straight from a cold larder was hard work to beat. The sultanas, citron and nutmeg mark it as a modest cousin of the fruited tea cakes and "election cakes" of the previous century, scaled down to one small tin and a single egg.