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July 15
Menu: Stuffed Shoulder of Veal, Braised; Buttered Beets Potato Roses; Onion and Tomato Salad; Rhubarb Dumplings; Mocha Cake; Coffee; a Mocha Cake-Sift 6 cups flour with 1 teaspoon baking powder into basin, add 1 teaspoon each of powdered cinnamon, nutmeg, and cloves, 1 cup brown sugar, 1/2 teaspoonful salt, and 1 cup Crisco; rub well together, add ½ a cup golden syrup, 1 cup strong cold coffee, 2 well beaten eggs, 1 cup currants and 1 cup sultana raisins, mix well together. Pour into Criscoed and papered tin and bake in moderate oven 2 hours.
This is a dense spiced fruit loaf leavened almost entirely by eggs and steam, not a layer cake with coffee buttercream. Read the flour-to-liquid ratio before you start: 6 cups of flour against roughly 2 cups of liquid gives a very stiff batter, closer to a scone dough than a pourable one.
- Bake at 325°F, not 350°F"moderate oven" is generally rendered as 350°F, though period guidance for it ranges from roughly 325°F to 375°F. A cake this large held for two hours will darken badly at the upper end; 325°F for 1 hour 45 minutes to 2 hours suits the mass better, and the long slow bake is the point of the recipe.
- Crisco measurementOne cup of shortening is about 190 g. Modern Crisco is no longer the same hydrogenated cottonseed product described in this book; any solid vegetable shortening behaves the same way here, and butter works if you accept a shorter shelf life.
- The tin is unspecified"A tin" of no stated size is the recipe's real gap. This quantity fills a 9-inch deep round cake tin or two 9x5-inch loaf pans. "Criscoed and papered" means greased and lined — parchment on the base and up the sides, which matters over two hours.
- Golden syrupHalf a cup of golden syrup, roughly 170 g. Light corn syrup is thinner and less flavoursome; a mix of corn syrup with a spoonful of molasses comes closer to the caramel note intended.
- Sultanas and currantsSultanas are golden raisins; currants here are the small dried Zante grapes, not fresh redcurrants or blackcurrants. Toss both in a little of the measured flour so they do not sink through the stiff batter.
- Rubbing in"Rub well together" means working the shortening into the dry ingredients with fingertips or a pastry blender until it resembles coarse meal, before any liquid goes in. Skipping this stage gives a tough, streaky crumb.
- Coffee strength"Strong cold coffee" should be genuinely strong — brewed at double normal strength or made with a heaped tablespoon of instant per cup — or the flavour disappears entirely under the spices.
- Testing and yieldStart checking at 90 minutes with a long skewer into the centre; it should come out clean but the cake will still be moist. Expect 16 to 20 slices. It keeps well wrapped for a week and improves after a day.
"Mocha" in this period simply meant coffee-flavoured, from the Yemeni port of Mokha through which much of Europe's early coffee trade passed; the modern association with chocolate came later. Everything else about the cake points to a British-style spiced fruit loaf — golden syrup, currants, sultanas, a mixing "basin" rather than a bowl — which fits the authorship of The Story of Crisco by Marion Harris Neil, a cookery writer hired by Procter & Gamble to demonstrate what its new all-vegetable shortening could do. Crisco was introduced in 1911, and the book's job was to prove the product could stand in for butter and lard in every department of baking; a stiff, long-baked fruit cake is the sort of recipe that shows off a fat that stays workable and does not turn rancid quickly. The recipe is assigned a date — this one July 16 — sparing the housekeeper the daily labour of deciding what to make.