Jelly Roll
1 cupful sugar 1 teaspoonful baking powder 4 tablespoonfuls milk Jelly or preserves 2 tablespoonfuls melted Crisco 2 cupfuls flour 1/4 teaspoonful salt 1 teaspoonful lemon extract Beat eggs and sugar together twenty minutes, remove beater, sift in flour, salt, and baking powder, add milk, extract, and melted Crisco. Grease large flat tin with Crisco, dust over with flour, pour in mixture and spread out evenly. Bake twelve minutes in moderately hot oven. Turn out on sugared paper, spread quickly with jelly or preserve and roll up at once. The cake will crack if spreading and rolling are not quickly done. Sliced jelly roll is delicious with custard.
Sufficient for one jelly roll.
The text as printed has been scrambled by column-setting: the ingredient list runs into what appears to be a neighbouring cake recipe. Read the method first, then sort the ingredients against it.
- The garbled ingredient listThe method calls only for eggs, sugar, flour, salt, baking powder, milk, lemon extract and melted Crisco. The trailing block — 2 cupfuls sugar, 1 cupful Crisco, 3½ cupfuls flour, 4 eggs, 1 cupful milk — looks like a butter-cake list that has drifted in from an adjacent recipe; but the sponge's own egg and sugar figures are missing from the first block, so some of those numbers may in fact belong here. The working set is eggs and sugar (quantities uncertain), flour, 1 tsp baking powder, ¼ tsp salt, 4 tbsp milk, 1 tsp lemon extract and 2 tbsp melted Crisco.
- Flour and sugar are genuinely ambiguousWith no sugar quantity attached to the sponge and two candidate flour figures, the amounts cannot be recovered with certainty from this page. A sheet baked twelve minutes on a flat tin is a thin sponge; two cupfuls of flour is a great deal of batter for that, and comparable rolled sponges of the period use about a cupful. Test on a small batch before committing.
- CriscoHydrogenated all-vegetable shortening, launched shortly before this book. The modern tub is reformulated but behaves the same melted; any neutral oil or melted butter substitutes here, where it is only two tablespoons for tenderness.
- Beat eggs and sugar twenty minutesThat is a hand-beater instruction. A stand mixer on high reaches the same stage in five to eight minutes: pale, tripled in volume, and falling from the whisk in a ribbon that holds its shape for a few seconds.
- Fold, do not stirThe flour is sifted onto the foam and the milk and melted fat go in last. Both deflate the batter fast. Fold with a spatula and stop the moment the streaks disappear.
- Moderately hot oven375-400F. Twelve minutes is right for a sheet a quarter-inch thick; the cake is done when it springs back and the edges just begin to pull from the tin. Overbaking is one cause of cracking; the recipe itself blames spreading and rolling that are not done quickly.
- Large flat tinA modern jelly-roll pan, 10 by 15 inches with a shallow rim. Grease, then line with parchment as well as dusting with flour — the original had no parchment and relied on the sugared paper at the turning-out stage.
- The hinge: roll it hotTurn the cake out onto sugared paper the instant it leaves the oven, spread the jelly while both cake and jelly are warm, and roll immediately. A cooled sponge has set and will split along the outer curve. If the preserve is stiff, warm and beat it smooth beforehand so no time is lost.
- YieldOne roll, as the recipe states. Best eaten the day it is made; the sponge dries out.
The Story of Crisco (1913) was written by Marion Harris Neil, cookery editor of the Ladies' Home Journal, for Procter & Gamble, who had introduced Crisco two years earlier as the first widely marketed hydrogenated vegetable shortening. The book's job was to prove the new fat could do everything lard and butter did, which is why Crisco appears in this sponge twice over — greasing the tin, and two tablespoons melted into a batter that scarcely needs fat at all. The jelly roll itself is older than the product by half a century: rolled sponges spread with jam turn up in British and American books from the mid-nineteenth century, called Swiss roll in England and jelly roll in the United States, and neither name has ever been traced convincingly to a Swiss origin. Its appeal to a promotional cookbook is obvious — it is quick, it photographs well in cross-section, and it fails visibly if the cook mishandles it, which makes the successful version feel like a credit to the shortening.