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July 5
Menu: Iced Pimiento Consomme; Small Tenderloins of Beef; Molded Potatoes; Corn Cakes; Orange, Grapefruit and Romaine Salad; Cup Custards; Coffee Corn Cakes-Make a custard from 2 eggs well beaten, 1/2 cup milk, 1/2 tablespoon Crisco, and 1/2 tablespoon sugar; beat into this 3/4 of cup of canned corn. Sift together twice, 7/8 cup of flour, 1 tablespoon baking powder, and 1/2 teaspoon salt; beat into other mixture, and drop in Criscoed muffin rings by the tablespoon; set in a Criscoed dripping pan, and bake in a moderate oven until done.
A quick corn muffin batter from a Crisco promotional cookbook, written when muffin rings set in a dripping pan did the work of a muffin tin. A few of the terms and proportions need translating.
- "Make a custard" is not a custardNothing is cooked at this stage. The word here just means beating eggs, milk, fat and sugar into a smooth liquid base before the dry ingredients go in.
- Moderate ovenAround 350F in modern terms; the book itself gives no temperatures. Small cakes of this size are likely to need roughly 18 to 25 minutes; they are done when the tops spring back and a tester comes out clean.
- Muffin rings and dripping panMetal rings arranged on a shallow roasting pan, greased so the batter would not stick. A standard greased muffin tin does the same job with less fuss.
- CriscoedThe book's verb for greasing with Crisco, its own hydrogenated vegetable shortening. Any solid shortening, butter or pan spray works; the half tablespoon in the batter should be melted and slightly cooled so it does not seize in the cold milk.
- 7/8 cup flourOne cup less two tablespoons, roughly 3 3/4 to 4 oz depending on how it is scooped. Weigh it if you want consistency.
- A tablespoon of baking powderThree teaspoons for slightly under a cup of flour, roughly two to three times the modern proportion of about 1 to 1 1/2 teaspoons per cup; that much can leave a bitter, metallic taste with today's double-acting powders. The batter should go into the oven promptly once mixed.
- Canned cornDrain it well and chop it coarsely if the kernels are large; excess packing liquid will thin the batter noticeably. Thawed frozen corn behaves the same way.
- YieldAbout six to eight small cakes, enough for two or three people alongside the rest of the July 6 dinner.
This page is generally traced to The Story of Crisco, the recipe book Procter & Gamble issued to introduce its hydrogenated cottonseed-oil shortening, which reached American kitchens in 1911. The bulk of the volume is conventional home cookery with Crisco written into every possible line, including the greasing of the pans, and the "Calendar of Dinners" material of this kind supplied a dated menu for every day of the year. Corn cakes of this kind, leavened with baking powder and stretched with canned sweet corn, were standard American quick-bread fare by then; canned corn was one of the earliest widely successful commercially packed vegetables, and its year-round availability is what allows a July menu to call for it as casually as a January one would.