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July 4
Menu: cream; Declaration Day.; Fruit Cocktail; Radishes; Carrot Soup; Stuffed Shoulder of Veal, Roasted; Potato Souffle Green Corn; Molded Spinach, French Dressing; Washington Ice Cream; Flag Cake; Coffee Flag Cake-2/3 cup sugar, 1/2 cup Crisco, 2/3 cup milk, 1½ cups flour, 2 teaspoons baking powder, 1/2 teaspoon salt, whites of 4 eggs, and 1 teaspoon vanilla. Cream Crisco and sugar together, add flour, salt, baking powder, milk, vanilla and whites of eggs beaten to a stiff froth. Mix carefully, turn into Criscoed and floured tin and bake in moderate oven for 3/4 of an hour. Decorate with frosting and tiny flags.
A plain white butter-style cake made with shortening, sized for a single small pan. The batter is thick and the method is the old one-bowl-in-sequence approach, which needs a little care to avoid deflating the whites.
- Moderate ovenSet the oven to 350F. At that temperature 45 minutes is on the long side for a batter this small; start testing at 30 minutes and pull it when a skewer comes out clean.
- Pan sizeNo tin is specified. The batter comes to somewhere between 3 and 4 cups, right for one 8-inch round or square, or a small loaf. In an 8-inch round expect roughly 25-30 minutes; a loaf will want the full three-quarters of an hour.
- "Criscoed"Grease the pan with shortening and dust with flour, exactly as written. Crisco is still sold and is the same style of solid vegetable shortening, though the formula changed in 2007 to reduce trans fats; the texture in baking is comparable.
- The hinge: fold the whites lastThe instruction to "mix carefully" is doing a lot of work. Cream the shortening and sugar, then alternate the dry ingredients with the milk to make a smooth batter, and only then fold in the stiffly beaten whites in two or three additions. Beating them in will collapse them and give you a dense, rubbery crumb.
- Stiff frothBeat the four whites to soft-to-firm peaks, not dry and grainy. Over-beaten whites break up when folded and leave streaks of cooked white in the crumb.
- Yield and frostingOne small layer, eight modest servings. The book leaves the frosting open; a plain boiled or confectioners'-sugar white icing suits it and keeps the flag-cake look. The "tiny flags" are unspecified, but small paper flags on picks are the obvious reading.
- LeaveningTwo teaspoons of baking powder to a cup and a half of flour is generous by modern standards but correct for a shortening cake leavened partly by whites. Use a double-acting powder and do not let the mixed batter stand.
The Story of Crisco was published by Procter & Gamble in 1913, two years after Crisco went on sale, and its recipe pages were written by Marion Harris Neil, then cookery editor of Ladies' Home Journal. The book's aim was frankly commercial: hydrogenated cottonseed oil was a new thing in American kitchens, and every recipe demonstrates it standing in for butter or lard, down to the coined verb "Criscoed" for a greased tin. The dated, day-by-day menu format belongs to Procter & Gamble's separate volume A Calendar of Dinners, and the date is the point -- July 5, the day after Independence Day, when a white-iced cake stuck with small paper flags would round out the holiday. White cakes made with egg whites alone were a Victorian and Edwardian fashion, prized because the crumb stayed pale, and a colorless shortening made that pallor easier to achieve than butter did.