Gennoise Cake
3/4 cupful flour. 6 tablespoonfuls sugar 6 tablespoonfuls melted Crisco 4 eggs 1 teaspoonful baking powder ½ teaspoonful almond extract Boiled frosting Preserved cherries or cocoanut salt 1/4 teaspoonful salt Break eggs into bowl, add sugar and beat for ten minutes over a pan of boiling water. Remove from water and beat till mixture is thick and cold; remove beater, sift in flour, salt, and baking powder; mix carefully, add melted Crisco and almond extract. Turn at once into small square greased and papered tin and bake in a moderate oven twenty minutes. Turn out and remove paper. Cool and cut in eight square pieces. Cover with boiled frosting and decorate with cherries or cocoanut. Sufficient for eight small cakes.
A whole-egg génoise dressed up as petits fours. The ingredient list in the original is defective — flour is called for in the method but never quantified — so read the notes before you start.
- The missing flourFlour is called for in the method but is absent from the ingredient list altogether. Since the original gives no figure, any amount is a guess: somewhere between 6 tablespoonfuls (matching the sugar and the Crisco) and about 3/4 cup (3 oz) sifted cake or pastry flour. The stray "salt" in the ingredient list is a duplicate of the 1/4 teaspoonful.
- CriscoThe book exists to sell it. Crisco is still sold and behaves as written, but any neutral shortening or melted, cooled unsalted butter works — butter gives more flavour and slightly less tender crumb.
- Moderate ovenThe book gives no temperature; a moderate oven is conventionally read as about 350-375F. Twenty minutes suits a shallow layer in an 8-inch square pan; the cake is done when the top springs back and the edges just pull from the sides.
- The hinge: the egg foamEverything depends on beating the eggs and sugar over hot water until they are thick and warm, then beating until cold and holding a ribbon. A stand mixer needs roughly 5 to 8 minutes rather than the ten specified, but do not stop early — the foam is the only leavening that matters here. The teaspoon of baking powder is insurance the classic version does without.
- Folding in the fatMelted shortening deflates a whole-egg foam faster than anything else in the recipe. Add it last, in a thin stream down the side of the bowl, folding with a spatula in a few strokes only. "Mix carefully" is doing a lot of work in the original.
- Pan and paperGrease the tin and line the bottom with parchment; the 1913 cook used plain paper. Turn the cake out while warm, peel the paper immediately, then cool completely before cutting or the frosting will slide.
- Boiled frostingAn Italian-meringue-style icing: hot sugar syrup beaten into egg whites. It sets with a thin crust and is what allows these squares to be handled. A quantity is given elsewhere in the book, not here.
- Almond extractA teaspoon and a half is assertive by current taste; a teaspoon is plenty.
- YieldEight small squares, as stated — closer to petits fours than to dessert portions.
Génoise — spelled "Gennoise" here — takes its name from Genoa and is the foundation sponge of French pâtisserie: whole eggs and sugar warmed and whipped to a foam, flour folded in, melted fat added at the end. It is a technique cake rather than a regional specialty, and by the early twentieth century American cookbooks used it as a base for small iced fancies of exactly this kind. Its presence in The Story of Crisco (1913), written by Marion Harris Neil for Procter & Gamble, is a piece of argument as much as a recipe: hydrogenated vegetable shortening was new and unfamiliar, and the book's job was to show it could stand in for butter and lard in every department, including the delicate ones. A cake whose fat must be melted and folded into a fragile egg foam was a good place to make that case, since shortening melts cleanly and carries no water to weigh down the batter.