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Crisco Batter Cakes
3 eggs 1 cupful buttermilk ½ cupful melted Crisco 1 cupful flour ½ teaspoonful baking soda 1 teaspoonful baking powder ½ teaspoonful salt Beat up yolks of eggs, add milk, Crisco, and flour mixed with salt, soda, and baking powder and beat till smooth. Fold in whites beaten to a stiff froth. Drop in large spoonfuls on ungreased skillet or griddle. Serve hot with butter or maple syrup.
Sufficient for fifteen cakes.
A thin, egg-rich buttermilk pancake from the promotional cookbook Procter & Gamble issued to teach cooks what to do with its new vegetable shortening. Two of the quantities as printed need thinking about before you start.
- The Crisco quantity is almost certainly a misprintOne and a half cupfuls of melted fat to one cupful of flour would give a batter that fries rather than bakes. Batter-cake recipes of the period usually call for no more than a tablespoonful or two of melted shortening, and that is the likelier reading here.
- Salt and soda, likewise1½ teaspoonful salt for fifteen cakes is aggressive; ½ teaspoon is closer to modern taste. The 1½ teaspoons of soda is more than one cup of buttermilk can neutralize, and the surplus tends to leave a soapy, faintly metallic edge. Half that amount, with the teaspoon of baking powder retained, raises them adequately.
- Crisco itselfStill sold, and the closest thing in the book to an unchanged ingredient — though the shortening was reformulated in the mid-2000s, with the reformulated product on shelves by 2007, to cut the trans fat to less than a gram per serving. Any solid vegetable shortening, or an equal quantity of melted butter or neutral oil, behaves much the same in this batter.
- "Ungreased skillet"That instruction reads as part of the sales pitch: the shortening in the batter was presumably meant to make greasing unnecessary. On modern cast iron or steel it will stick. Wipe the pan with a film of fat and heat it until a drop of water skitters, roughly medium, about 375F on an electric griddle.
- Folding the whitesThe separated eggs are what distinguish these from a plain buttermilk pancake. Fold them in at the last moment and cook straight away; the froth collapses within a few minutes and the cakes turn flat and tough.
- ButtermilkPeriod buttermilk was the thin liquid left from churning. Cultured buttermilk from a carton is thicker and more acidic and works well; thin it with a spoonful of milk if the batter will not drop from the spoon.
- Turning and yieldCook until the surface bubbles are breaking and the edges look dry, one to two minutes, then turn once. Fifteen cakes serves three or four.
The Story of Crisco (1913) was published by Procter & Gamble a couple of years after Crisco went on sale in 1911, and it is less a cookbook than an argument: some six hundred recipes assembled to show that a hydrogenated cottonseed oil shortening could do everything lard and butter did, in frying, pastry, and cake alike. Hence the odd insistence on the ungreased griddle here, and the near-comic frequency with which the brand name appears in the ingredient lists. Batter cakes themselves needed no introduction to American readers — for they are commonly called pancakes or griddle cakes, the term being chiefly Southern, and buttermilk versions raised with soda had been standard breakfast fare for decades before Crisco existed. The book's contribution was to swap out the fat, and to bind a familiar dish to a new product at the moment when factory-made shortening was displacing the pail of lard in the pantry.