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For Filling (Teaspoonful Crisco ounce)
1 teaspoonful Crisco 1 ounce chocolate 1 teaspoonful vanilla extract ½ cupful hot water ½ cupful brown sugar ½ cupful granulated sugar Pinch salt For cake. Put granulated sugar into small pan and melt over fire till brown, remove from fire, add boiling water, stir quickly, return to stove, and stir until thick syrup; set aside to cool. Beat Crisco and sugar to a cream, add eggs well beaten, flour, baking powder, salt, vanilla, three tablespoonfuls of the syrup and water. Mix and beat two minutes, then divide into two Criscoed and floured layer tins and bake in moderate oven twenty minutes.
For filling. Melt granulated sugar in small pan and stir until it becomes a light brown syrup, add the water gradually, then brown sugar, Crisco, salt, and chocolate stirring all the time. Cook until it forms a soft ball when tried in cold water, or 240° F. Remove from fire, add vanilla, beat until creamy, then spread between cakes. Sufficient for one layer cake. 1 cupful sugar 3/4 teaspoonfuls salt
The ingredient list here has been scrambled in printing — the cake and the filling quantities are jumbled together, and the cake's eggs, flour and baking powder never appear at all. Treat the filling as the usable recipe and use a plain two-layer butter cake underneath it.
- The hinge: 240°FEverything depends on hitting the soft-ball stage. Use a candy thermometer rather than the cold-water test; pull the pan at 240°F, no higher, or the filling sets hard and cracks when spread.
- CriscoStill sold, but the modern formulation has been reworked to cut trans fats and is not identical to the 1913 product. The single teaspoonful here contributes little beyond gloss and mouthfeel; unsalted butter does the same job.
- Melting the sugarGranulated sugar melted dry in a heavy pan goes from pale amber to burnt very quickly. Take it off the heat at the colour of a copper coin, and stand back when the water goes in — it will spit.
- Missing cake quantitiesThe cake instructions call for eggs, flour and baking powder that the list omits. A plain two-layer yellow cake formula should take the three tablespoonfuls of caramel syrup, allowing for the added liquid.
- "Moderate oven"No temperature is given; moderate is generally read as roughly 350–375°F. Twenty minutes suits two thin layers; test at eighteen.
- "Criscoed" tinsGrease and flour, or line with parchment. This is a fairly sticky batter because of the syrup, and it will grip a bare pan.
- ChocolateOne ounce of unsweetened baking chocolate. The period product was bitter block chocolate, not chips or eating chocolate, and the filling is sweet enough already that a semi-sweet substitution unbalances it.
- Beating and spreadingBeat off the heat only until the gloss dulls and the mixture thickens — it stiffens fast, and a caramel beaten to the point of graininess cannot be spread. Yield is one two-layer cake, roughly eight to ten servings.
- The stray line"1 cupful sugar / ¾ teaspoonfuls salt" at the end is orphaned type from the ingredient panel; the salt in the filling should be a pinch, not three-quarters of a teaspoon.
The Story of Crisco (1913) was a promotional cookbook issued by Procter & Gamble to teach American cooks what to do with a wholly new substance: hydrogenated cottonseed oil, sold as a shortening that behaved like lard but came from a plant. The book repeatedly inserts Crisco where butter, lard or suet had been, which is why a teaspoonful of it turns up in a caramel filling that hardly needs fat at all. The filling itself is a burnt-sugar caramel, a flavour popular in American layer cakes from the late nineteenth century into the 1920s and often called simply "caramel" or "burnt sugar" icing; melting dry sugar to brown and then dissolving it in boiling water gave cooks a syrup usable for both cake and frosting. The garbled state of this page looks like two ingredient columns running together in transcription.