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Crisco Sponge Cake
1¼ cupfuls flour 2 teaspoonfuls baking powder ½ teaspoonful orange extract ½ cupful cold water Cream Crisco; add salt, yolks of eggs well beaten, and sugar, and beat for five minutes, add orange extract and cold water. Beat up whites of eggs to a stiff froth and add alternately with the flour sifted with the baking powder. Divide into Criscoed and floured gem pans and bake in a moderate oven for fifteen minutes.
Sufficient for twelve cakes. ½ cupful sugar ½ cupful Crisco 1 teaspoonful salt
The ingredient list as printed is scrambled and incomplete — the quantities were set in a side column and have come through the transcription out of order and partly missing. Read the points below before shopping.
- The list does not add upAs given: "1/4 cupfuls flour," 1 cup sugar, 1 cup Crisco, 1 teaspoon salt, 2 teaspoons baking powder, 1½ teaspoons orange extract, 1½ cups cold water — and an unstated number of eggs, separated. A cake with a quarter cup of flour to a cup of fat and a cup and a half of water is not a cake. The flour figure has almost certainly lost its leading digit (2¼ or 3¼ cupfuls would both be plausible for twelve gem cakes), and the water was more likely ½ cupful. Treat these as unrecoverable rather than guessing at the press.
- EggsThe method calls for beaten yolks and separately whipped whites, but no number survives in the list. Three or four would suit a batter of this size, but that is inference, not evidence from the book.
- Gem pansA gem pan is a cast-iron muffin pan; they came in various sizes, and this recipe's yield implies twelve cups. A standard modern muffin tin is the practical equivalent.
- "Criscoed and floured"Grease with shortening and dust with flour, knocking out the excess. Paper liners defeat the point — these cakes were meant to take a crust from the hot fat film.
- Moderate ovenRoughly 350-375F. Fifteen minutes is plausible for small cakes at that heat; test with a skewer at twelve.
- Not a spongeDespite the name, this is a creamed-fat cake with whipped whites folded in, not a true sponge, which carries no added fat. Fold the whites and flour in alternately with a light hand -- the five minutes of beating belongs to the fat, sugar and yolks, not to the finished batter.
- Crisco itselfThe 1913 product was hydrogenated cottonseed oil and behaved much like today's shortening, though modern formulations have been reblended to reduce trans fats. Cream it at cool room temperature, not warm.
- YieldTwelve small cakes, as stated.
The Story of Crisco was written by Marion Harris Neil and published by Procter & Gamble in 1913, two years after Crisco went on sale, and it is a cookbook in the service of a single product: the recipes are built around the shortening, and several, like this one, use it in place of butter in cakes that had always been made with butter. Hydrogenated cottonseed oil was new, cheap, shelf-stable in a way lard was not, and free of animal fat -- a point the company pressed in marketing to Jewish households, since the fat was neither meat nor dairy. Calling a creamed-fat cake a "sponge" was loose even by the standards of the day, though how widely the label was stretched is not something this page can show.