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September 5
Menu: Hot Boiled Tongue, Lemon Sauce; Boiled Potatoes French Fried Parsnips; Cauliflower Salad; Baked Quinces Jam Cake Coffee Jam Cake-Cream 2/3 cup Crisco with 1 cup sugar, add 3 well beaten eggs, 1/2 cup sour cream, 1 teaspoon soda, 2 cups flour, 1/2 glass strawberry preserves, 1 teaspoon cinnamon, 1/2 teaspoon each cloves, 1/2 teaspoon nutmeg, and 1/2 teaspoon salt, mix and bake in layers. Put strawberry preserves between layers, and white icing on top.
A menu-page cake from the Crisco calendar, given in the compressed style of the period: no pan size, no oven temperature, no baking time. The proportions are sound, but a few of the measures need translating before you start.
- "1/2 glass" preservesA jelly glass of the era held roughly 8 ounces, so half a glass is about 1/2 cup of strawberry preserves in the batter. You will want a further 3/4 to 1 cup for spreading between the layers.
- Oven and timeNone is given. Bake at 350F; two 9-inch layers take 25 to 30 minutes, three 8-inch layers about 22 to 25. The jam and the sugar make the crumb brown early, so judge by a clean tester rather than colour.
- Soda and sour creamThe teaspoon of soda is leavened by the acid in the sour cream and the preserves — there is no baking powder here. Use real cultured sour cream, not a reduced-fat sour cream substitute, and get the batter into the pans promptly once the soda is mixed in.
- Creaming CriscoCrisco was sold as a direct replacement for butter and lard, and 2/3 cup of any solid vegetable shortening still creams well with the sugar. Butter can be swapped in at the same volume; the cake will taste richer and brown a little faster.
- FlourPeriod flour was often softer, lower-protein wheat than modern all-purpose, though milling varied and the recipe does not specify a type. Cake flour, or all-purpose with two tablespoons per cup replaced by cornstarch, gives a crumb closer to the original.
- White icingIn this period "white icing" on a jam cake often meant a boiled or seven-minute icing — sugar syrup beaten into egg whites — rather than a confectioners' sugar glaze. The recipe does not say which; either works.
- YieldTwo 9-inch layers, serving 10 to 12. It keeps well for three or four days under a cover, and the spice flavour improves overnight.
- The rest of the menuThe page heading belongs to another dish entirely; what is printed here is the September 6 dinner — baked quinces, this cake, and coffee — with the cake alone spelled out.
The Story of Crisco was published by Procter & Gamble in 1913, two years after Crisco went on sale, and it is as much an argument as a cookbook: the recipes exist to prove that a hydrogenated vegetable shortening could stand in for butter and lard in everything from pastry to frying. The "Calendar of Dinners" section supplied a full menu for every day of the year, a common device in period household books that spared the cook the daily decision and, incidentally, kept the product in use year-round. Jam cake itself is a Southern and border-state tradition — a spiced butter cake with preserves worked into the batter, generally traced to the habit of using up the previous season's put-up fruit — and strawberry, blackberry and damson were the usual choices. Its appearance on a September menu, alongside baked quinces, places it squarely in the end-of-summer preserving calendar that is thought to have shaped many American kitchens before year-round refrigeration.