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Crisco Fruit Cake
1 wineglassful brandy ½ lb. blanched and chopped almonds 1½ lb. English walnut meats (broken in small pieces) 1½ lb. stoned and chopped dates 1 lb. currants 1 lb. seeded raisins 1 lb. glace cherries 1 teaspoonful baking soda 1 teaspoonful salt ½ cupful New Orleans molasses ½ cupful cold black coffee 1 teaspoonful grated nutmeg 2 teaspoonfuls powdered cinnamon 1 teaspoonful powdered cloves Cream Crisco and sugar together, add eggs well beaten, beat five minutes, then add coffee, soda mixed with molasses, brandy, flour sifted Cakes with salt and spices. Now add raisins, currants, dates, cherries cut in halves, and nuts. Mix carefully and turn into Criscoed and papered tin and bake in moderate oven two and a half hours. Brandy may be omitted. Sufficient for one large cake. 1½ cupfuls sugar 1½ cupfuls milk 1½ cake chocolate
The text as printed is incomplete: the shortening, sugar, eggs and flour quantities for the cake itself are missing from the ingredient list, and the final three lines (sugar, milk, chocolate) belong to a different recipe entirely. Treat what follows as guidance for reading the page rather than a working formula.
- Missing quantitiesThe method calls for creamed Crisco and sugar, beaten eggs and sifted flour, none of which appear in the list above. The original numbers are simply not on this page and any figure here would be a guess.
- Stray lines"1½ cupfuls sugar / 1½ cupfuls milk / 1½ cake chocolate" appears to belong to a separate chocolate recipe that has run together with this entry. Ignore it.
- WineglassfulAbout 2 fluid ounces, a quarter cup. The book notes the brandy may be omitted; in a cake of this size it is flavour, not preservation.
- CriscoHydrogenated vegetable shortening, still sold under the same name though reformulated since 1913 to remove trans fats. "Criscoed" pan means greased with shortening; "papered" means lined, which matters over a two-and-a-half-hour bake.
- New Orleans molassesDark, unsulphured cane molasses, not blackstrap. Modern unsulphured molasses is the closest match; blackstrap will read bitter at a cupful and a half.
- Seeded raisins, glacé cherries"Seeded" means the seeds have been removed, i.e. ordinary raisins. Glacé cherries are the candied kind, sold for baking; the bright red ones give the period look.
- Oven"Moderate" is generally taken as around 350F, but seven and a half pounds of fruit and nuts in one tin will scorch at the edges long before the centre sets. Long-baked fruit cakes of this size are normally held at 300-325F, with the tin wrapped or double-lined.
- Scale and yieldThe fruit and nuts alone come to roughly seven and a half pounds. "One large cake" here means a very large tin or, more practically, several loaf or tube pans. Expect a cake that keeps for weeks, wrapped, and slices thin.
The Story of Crisco (1913) was written by Marion Harris Neil for Procter & Gamble, two years after Crisco itself went on sale, and it is one of the clearest examples of a cookbook built to teach cooks what to do with a brand-new ingredient. Crisco was hydrogenated cottonseed oil, a solid fat that behaved like lard but came from a plant, and the book takes pains to show it creaming into cakes, frying doughnuts and greasing tins — hence the verb "Criscoed," which appears throughout. A brandied, molasses-dark fruit cake of this scale was standard Christmas and wedding fare in American households, made weeks ahead and matured; putting one in the book argued that the new fat could hold its own in the most traditional and most expensive cake in the repertoire. The cold black coffee is a period touch, used in dark cakes for colour and a faint bitterness that keeps the molasses from cloying.