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Coffee Layer Cake
1 cupful dark brown sugar 2/3 cupful cold strong coffee 3 yolks of eggs 1/2 cupful Crisco 1/4 cupful raisins 1 tablespoonful molasses
This is the ingredient column only — the method, and evidently part of the ingredient list, did not come through with the page. Read it as a shopping list rather than a set of instructions.
- It is incomplete as printedThere is no flour and no leavening here, and a layer cake needs both. Anything you bake from this list alone will be a pan of sweet paste; use the quantities as a flavour guide alongside a complete butter-cake formula.
- What "cupful" meansAn American cup of the period is the same 8 fluid ounces we use now, so 1/2 cupful Crisco is 4 fluid ounces (about 95 g by weight) and 2/3 cupful coffee is a little over 150 ml.
- CriscoStill sold, though reformulated more than once since 1913 — the original was hydrogenated cottonseed oil, today's is a soybean/palm blend. It creams like butter but carries no flavour and no water, and cakes made with it tend to stay soft longer than butter cakes.
- Cold strong coffeeThe coffee should be cold: warm liquid will soften the creamed shortening and the batter may separate.
- Dark brown sugar and molassesEarly twentieth-century brown sugar was less uniformly refined than the modern product; a dark muscovado gets closer. The tablespoon of molasses is there for colour and moisture as much as taste — unsulphured molasses, not blackstrap.
- Three yolks, no whitesA yolk-only cake bakes dense and tender rather than airy; the missing portion of the recipe may well have called for whipped whites folded in at the end, or for a chemical leavening, but that is a guess.
- The raisinsA quarter cup is a light scattering. Toss them in a spoonful of the measured flour so they do not sink through a batter this loose.
- OvenThe page gives no baking direction of any kind. As a modern starting point only, a cake of this kind in two shallow layers would take a moderate oven, around 350F, for roughly 25 minutes; deeper single pans need longer at a lower heat, around 325F.
The Story of Crisco (1913) was written by Marion Harris Neil for Procter & Gamble, two years after Crisco went on sale, and it is a cookbook with a job to do: nearly every recipe in it exists to show that hydrogenated vegetable shortening could stand in for butter and lard. Crisco was marketed hard to households that could not or would not cook with lard — it was promoted as neither meat nor dairy, and so acceptable in kosher kitchens — and as a cheaper, more shelf-stable fat than butter. "Coffee cake" here means a cake flavoured with coffee, not the sweetened breakfast bread the term later came to mean in America; brewed coffee as a cake liquid was a common trick for deepening the colour and flavour of a brown-sugar batter, and it pairs naturally with the molasses and raisins.