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For Lemon Filling
4 tablespoonfuls Crisco 2 lemons 3/4 cupful sugar For cake. 4 yolks of eggs 1 white of egg 1/4 teaspoonful salt Put the eggs, sugar, and lemon rind into basin, stand it over pan of boiling water, and beat until warm; then remove from hot water, and continue beating until mixture is stiff and cold; then add flour mixed with baking powder and salt, and pass through sieve, add Crisco melted but cool, taking care to stir very gently, but on no account beat it. Divide mixture into two small Criscoed and floured layer cake tins, and bake ten minutes in moderately hot oven. Turn out and cool, then put together with lemon filling.
For filling. Beat up eggs in saucepan, add Crisco, salt, grated rinds and strained lemon juice. Stir with wooden spoon over gentle heat until mixture just comes to boiling point. When cold use.
Sufficient for one layer cake.
The text as printed runs the cake and the filling together, and the ingredient lists have been shuffled — read it as two recipes before you start. What follows sorts out the vessels, temperatures and the one step that decides whether the filling sets or scrambles.
- The ingredient lists are jumbledThe cake is made genoise-style: eggs, sugar and lemon rind whisked warm, then flour with baking powder and salt folded in along with melted, cooled shortening (a true genoise carries no baking powder). No flour or baking powder quantity is given anywhere in the text, and the 3/4 cupful sugar and 1 cupful sugar have been split between the two halves. Work from a modern genoise for the cake proportions rather than guessing.
- Filling quantities3/4 cupful of shortening in a lemon filling is an unusually large amount even by the standards of a Crisco promotional book, and it may belong to the cake. A curd of 4 yolks, 1 white, 2 lemons and about a cup of sugar is conventionally finished with 4 to 6 tablespoons of fat.
- Do not let the filling boilThis is the hinge. The recipe says to take it "just to boiling point", but a yolk mixture begins to curdle not far above 180F (sugar and lemon juice raise that somewhat), and an actual boil will scramble it. Cook over low heat, stirring constantly, until it coats the spoon and steams, then pull it off.
- Moderately hot oven375F to 400F. Ten minutes suits thin layers in shallow tins; test with a light touch on the centre rather than a skewer, which tears a genoise crumb.
- Fold, never beatThe instruction "on no account beat it" is meant literally. The whipped egg foam does most of the lifting and the baking powder the rest; sift the flour over in stages and fold, then stream in the cooled melted fat down the side of the bowl.
- Warm the eggs, then cool themBeating over boiling water dissolves the sugar and lets the eggs take up far more air. Continue beating off the heat until the mixture is at room temperature and holds a ribbon — a stand mixer takes six to eight minutes.
- Criscoed tinsGrease with solid shortening and dust with flour. The recipe calls for two small layer tins; with no flour quantity given the size is guesswork, but 7- to 8-inch tins are a reasonable reading.
- Crisco todayModern Crisco is reformulated and no longer the hydrogenated cottonseed product of 1913. It still works here; unsalted butter, melted and cooled, gives a better flavour in both cake and filling.
- Yield and keepingOne two-layer cake, as the recipe states. The filling keeps about a week refrigerated in a covered jar and should be fully cold before it touches the cake.
The Story of Crisco was written by Marion Harris Neil and published by Procter & Gamble in 1913, two years after Crisco itself was introduced — a hydrogenated cottonseed-oil shortening sold as a clean, odourless, all-purpose replacement for both butter and lard. Nearly every recipe in the book is a familiar dish rewritten with Crisco standing in for the traditional fat, which is why a lemon curd here is finished with shortening rather than butter, and why the tins are "Criscoed" rather than buttered. The cake itself is a plain sponge, raised in part with baking powder and long established in English and American cookery by 1913; the lemon filling is ordinary lemon curd, a British preserve of eggs, sugar, butter and lemon that had been made since at least the mid-nineteenth century. Both were chosen precisely because they were unremarkable: the point of the book was to show that nothing needed to be given up.