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Black Cake with Prune Filling
1½ cupfuls sugar ½ teaspoonful salt 3 eggs 1/2 cupful Crisco 1 cupful milk ½ teaspoonful baking soda 2 cupfuls flour 1 teaspoonful baking powder ½ teaspoonful vanilla extract 1/3 cake chocolate
This is an ingredient list rather than a full recipe — the method, the oven, the pan and the prune filling itself all sat elsewhere in the book or were assumed known. What follows fills in what a modern cook needs to work from it.
- No method is givenTreat it as a standard creaming-method cake: cream the Crisco with the sugar, beat in the eggs, add the melted chocolate and vanilla, then the flour sifted with salt and baking powder alternately with the milk, with the soda dissolved in a little of the milk last. Nothing in the list suggests any other order.
- "1/3 cake chocolate"This means unsweetened block chocolate, not chips or cocoa. Cakes of chocolate in this period were commonly half a pound scored into eight one-ounce squares, so a third is roughly 2 to 3 ounces — the exact intent is not recoverable, and 2 ounces melted and cooled gives a reliable result.
- The leavening is aggressiveA teaspoon and a half of soda plus a teaspoon of baking powder against sweet milk and only 2 cups of flour is more alkali than the batter has acid to neutralise. Excess alkali does darken chocolate toward black rather than brown, which may be the point of the name, though nothing in the list says so; it can also leave a soapy edge. Sour milk or buttermilk in place of the sweet milk brings it into balance, or cut the soda to half a teaspoon.
- SaltA teaspoon and a half is high by modern cake standards, and the Crisco of the period was unsalted. Three quarters of a teaspoon is plenty.
- CriscoStill sold, still an all-vegetable shortening, though reformulated over the last century to remove trans fats. It measures and creams like the original; pack it into the cup rather than spooning it loosely.
- Oven and panNeither is given here. As a modern equivalent, 350F: two 9-inch round layers take 25 to 30 minutes; the same batter in a loaf pan wants 45 to 55 minutes at 325F.
- The prune fillingNot included here. Stewed pitted prunes, drained and mashed or chopped to a thick paste with a little of their cooking liquid, sugar to taste and lemon juice, cooked down until it holds a mound on the spoon, is a common period approach. It must be cool and stiff before it goes between the layers.
- YieldTwo 9-inch layers, filled — about 10 to 12 slices.
The Story of Crisco (1913) was a promotional cookbook: Procter & Gamble had launched Crisco, a hydrogenated cottonseed shortening, in 1911, and needed to teach cooks what to do with a solid white fat that was neither butter nor lard. Marion Harris Neil supplied hundreds of recipes, and cakes were the natural showcase, since a bland, uniform shortening creams predictably and does not carry the flavour or salt variability of butter. "Black cake" is a slippery name " in earlier English and Caribbean usage it means a dark, spirit-soaked fruitcake " though here it attaches to a chocolate layer cake pushed dark with baking soda.