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February 22
Menu: Olives; Cherry Cocktail; Salted Nuts Oyster Soup; Fried Chicken, Cream Gravy; Peas; Sweet Potatoes; White Grape Salad Beaten Biscuits; Washington Pie; Martha Washington Fruit Cake; Fruit Punch; Coffee Washington Pie-3/4 cup sugar, 1 tablespoon Crisco; beat together thoroughly; add ½ cup sweet milk, 2 cups flour, 2 beaten eggs, 2 teaspoons baking powder, 1 teaspoon lemon; make into 3 cakes and put jelly or custard between.
A lean, cheap layer cake from a promotional calendar of dinners, baked for Washington's birthday week. It reads like a butter cake but with only a tablespoon of fat it behaves more like a sponge, and that governs how you handle it.
- The hinge: don't try to cream itOne tablespoon of shortening will not cream with three-quarters of a cup of sugar. Stir them to a damp sand, then build the batter on the beaten eggs — beat the eggs well and fold the flour and milk in alternately and lightly. Overworking this batter after the flour goes in gives a tough, rubbery crumb, since there is almost no fat to shorten the gluten.
- "3 cakes" means three thin layersDivide the batter between three greased 8-inch round tins; the layers will be well under an inch thick. Cakes of this sort were sometimes baked in pie plates, which is the usual explanation offered for the "pie" in the name.
- Oven and timeThe recipe gives no oven direction. Bake in a moderate oven, around 350-375F. Thin layers this lean bake in 12 to 18 minutes; test at 12. Overbaking is the usual failure here — there is no fat to keep them moist.
- "1 teaspoon lemon"Almost certainly lemon extract rather than juice or zest, though the recipe does not say. A teaspoon of extract is assertive by modern standards; half a teaspoon of extract, or the grated zest of one lemon, sits better with jelly filling.
- "Sweet milk"Plain fresh whole milk, specified to distinguish it from the sour milk or buttermilk that older recipes used with saleratus. Since the leavening here is baking powder, no acid is wanted.
- FlourTwo cups of the soft winter-wheat flour of the period would weigh appreciably less than two cups of modern all-purpose, perhaps 8 to 9 ounces depending on how it was measured. Modern all-purpose is stronger; weigh rather than scoop, or swap 2 tablespoons of the flour for cornstarch if you want a tenderer crumb.
- Crisco itselfAny solid vegetable shortening works, and at one tablespoon the substitution hardly matters — softened butter gives better flavour with no change in structure.
- Filling and keepingJelly-filled, it holds a day at room temperature under a dome. Filled with custard it is a refrigerated cake and should be eaten the same day; the lean layers dry quickly and also absorb custard, so assemble close to serving.
- YieldOne three-layer 8-inch cake, 8 to 10 servings. Traditionally finished with nothing more than a dusting of powdered sugar.
Washington Pie is a New England cake, not a pie: thin layers of plain cake baked in pie tins and sandwiched with jam or jelly, a close relation of the Boston cream pie that came out of the same habit of baking cake batter in whatever round tin the kitchen had. Its name and its association with Washington's birthday, February 22, made it a fixture of late-winter menus, which is why it turns up here dated February 23 in a day-by-day calendar of dinners. The source is one of the 1913 Crisco cookery books Marion Harris Neil wrote for Procter & Gamble to teach cooks what to do with the hydrogenated cottonseed shortening the company had introduced two years earlier conspicuous tablespoon of it, more advertisement than technique.