Gold Cake
3/4 cupful sugar 5 tablespoonfuls Crisco 1/2 cupful milk 4 yolks of eggs. (Kate B. Vaughn) 1½ cupfuls flour ½ teaspoonful salt 3 teaspoonfuls baking powder ½ teaspoonful lemon extract Cream Crisco and sugar together. Beat egg yolks very light and add to creamed mixture. Add dry ingredients, milk, and lemon extract and mix well. Turn into a small Criscoed and floured cake tin and bake in moderate oven forty-five minutes.
Sufficient for one small cake.
The ingredient list as printed in the book is scrambled and incomplete — flour and sugar appear twice, and the fat, egg yolks and milk are named in the method but never quantified. Treat this as a template rather than a working formula.
- Missing quantitiesNo amount is given for the Crisco, the egg yolks or the milk. A cake of this type and era with 1½ cupfuls flour and ¾ cupful sugar would ordinarily take about ½ cupful fat, 4 to 6 yolks and ½ cupful milk, but that is reconstruction, not what the page says.
- The salt and extract figures"1½ teaspoonful salt" and "1½ teaspoonful lemon extract" are both odd, and may well be typesetting damage for ½ teaspoonful of each: 1½ teaspoonfuls of salt in 1½ cupfuls of flour would taste markedly salty, and the same amount of lemon extract would dominate the crumb.
- CriscoStill sold, though reformulated more than once; today's version has far less trans fat than the 1913 product. Any solid vegetable shortening behaves the same way here, creaming to a fine-grained batter.
- "Criscoed"House usage for greased with shortening. Grease and flour the tin, or line the base with parchment.
- Moderate oven350F. Forty-five minutes is right for a deep small tin; in a shallow 8-inch round, check at 25 to 30 minutes and test with a skewer.
- "One small cake"This quantity of flour suits a single 8-inch layer, a small loaf tin, or about a dozen cupcakes. It serves six to eight.
- Creaming matters mostBeyond the baking powder, the aeration comes from beating the fat and sugar thoroughly pale and the yolks "very light" as directed. Mix only until the batter is smooth.
Gold cake is the twin of silver or white cake: nineteenth-century households that had beaten a dozen whites into an angel food or white layer cake were left with the yolks, and gold cake used them up, taking its colour and its name from them. The two recipes are often said to have been printed side by side. Its appearance here reflects the purpose of The Story of Crisco (1913), a promotional cookbook issued by Procter & Gamble to show that its new hydrogenated vegetable shortening could stand in for butter and lard across the whole domestic repertoire. The white fat gives a paler crumb than butter and does not carry the flavour of lard. Kate B. Vaughn was a domestic-science writer of the period, and it is often suggested that recipes credited to named cooking authorities lent the new product borrowed authority at a time when housekeepers may have been wary of a fat that came from cottonseed.