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For Cake (Cupful Crisco cupful milk)
½ cupful Crisco 1 cupful milk 2 teaspoonfuls vanilla extract 3 teaspoonfuls baking powder 1 cupful sugar 3 cupfuls flour ½ teaspoonful salt 4 eggs
This is a formula rather than a method: the book gives proportions and assumes the reader knows how a butter cake is assembled. Everything below fills in what the list leaves out.
- No method is givenTreat it as a standard creaming-method cake: beat the Crisco with the sugar until light, add the eggs one at a time, then alternate the sifted dry ingredients with the milk, finishing with the vanilla. With four whole eggs this is a plain butter-style cake batter rather than a white cake.
- No oven temperature eitherA cake of this type would suit a moderate oven, around 350F. Reckon on 25-30 minutes for layers and 45-55 for a loaf or tube, until a skewer comes out clean.
- Crisco is still CriscoVegetable shortening remains on shelves, though the formula was reworked to cut trans fats between 2004 and 2007. The original was hydrogenated cottonseed oil; today's is a soy and palm blend. It behaves much the same in creaming.
- Why only half a cup of fatCrisco is 100 percent fat, where butter is roughly 80 percent fat and 15-17 percent water. Crisco's own substitution guidance called for slightly less shortening than a butter recipe would use, with a little liquid added back. Substituting butter one for one here will give a slacker, wetter batter.
- The salt looks wrongThe salt looks high -- One and a half teaspoons of salt for three cups of flour is a lot for a sweet cake and may be a misprint for half a teaspoon. Half to three-quarters of a teaspoon is nearer what the proportions want.
- Cupful and teaspoonfulThese are level measures of the standard American cup, 8 fluid ounces, the convention already fixed by cookery schools when the book was printed.
- YieldThree cups of flour and four eggs should give two 8- or 9-inch layers, or a loaf. The recipe as printed is unfrosted; a butter icing or boiled frosting would be the usual finish.
Crisco was introduced by Procter & Gamble in 1911, and The Story of Crisco was one of several promotional cookbooks the company circulated to teach households what to do with a fat that was neither butter nor lard. That was the whole marketing problem: American cooks knew how to bake with butter and fry with lard, and hydrogenated cottonseed oil had no place in either habit. The books answered by rewriting familiar standards - plain cake, pie crust, doughnuts - with Crisco quantities worked out for its higher fat content, so that a cook could see the substitution done for her rather than guess at it. Crisco was also promoted as neither meat nor dairy, which won it a following in kosher kitchens, and as a shelf-stable fat that did not go rancid in a warm pantry. A bare list like this one, with no method attached, tells you the intended reader already knew how to make a cake and needed only the new proportions.