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Lord Baltimore Cake
1 cupful sugar 3/4 cupful Crisco. ½ cupful cold water 1 teaspoonful vanilla extract 1 cupful sugar Filling or ½ cupful boiling water 2 whites of eggs Pinch cream of tartar 2½ cupfuls flour 2½ teaspoonfuls baking powder ½ teaspoonful salt 6 yolks of eggs
The text here has come through as a scrambled ingredient list with the method lost, so read it as a formula rather than a procedure. Once the pieces are sorted out it is a standard yolk-rich butter cake with a boiled frosting, and it behaves like one.
- The list is garbledWhat looks like two separate ingredient columns has been run together: the cake (yolks, flour, baking powder, salt, water, vanilla) and the boiled frosting (boiling water, egg whites, cream of tartar). Only one sugar quantity survives, so which column it belongs to, or whether a second has been lost, cannot be told. Treat the list as two before you begin.
- The missing shorteningThis is a Crisco promotional book, and a shortening quantity appears to have dropped out of the list: a cake with two and a half cups of flour, six yolks and no fat at all is not what was intended. How much was called for cannot be recovered from what survives. Modern vegetable shortening is the direct descendant, though it is no longer the hydrogenated cottonseed oil of 1913.
- Quantities checkedThe salt reads half a teaspoonful against two and a half cupfuls of flour, which is the right proportion for a cake this size. The two half-cupful water measures, one cold for the batter and one boiling for the filling, stand as printed.
- OvenThe page gives no baking instruction of any kind. For a layer cake of this size, work at about 350F: two or three 8-inch layers take 25 to 30 minutes, a single deep pan 40 to 45.
- The frosting is the hingeSugar, boiling water and cream of tartar are boiled to the soft-ball stage, 238-240F on a thermometer, then poured in a thin stream into the whites beaten stiff. Pour too fast, or with a syrup below temperature, and the icing stays soupy; boil past 245F and it sets hard and grainy before it is spread.
- What goes in the fillingThe word "Filling" is left bare here. A Lord Baltimore filling is that same boiled frosting with chopped pecans, candied cherries and crumbled macaroons folded in, spread between the layers with the plain frosting outside.
- The six yolksThey are the point of the cake, giving the crumb its colour and richness. The two whites called for by the frosting leave four spare, to be used elsewhere.
- YieldTwo or three 8-inch layers, serving 10 to 12.
Lord Baltimore cake is the yolk-fed twin of Lady Baltimore, the white cake with a fruit-and-nut boiled icing that Owen Wister made famous in his 1906 novel Lady Baltimore, set in Charleston. The Lord Baltimore version is generally understood as a thrifty response to it: having spent the whites on one cake, a cook made the other with the yolks, and the two are often given as a facing pair in early twentieth-century books. Its appearance in The Story of Crisco (1913) is commercial as much as culinary. Procter & Gamble had introduced Crisco two years earlier and needed to show American housewives that a hydrogenated vegetable shortening could stand in for butter and lard in the whole familiar repertoire, so the book takes the best-known cakes of the day and rebuilds each one around the new fat.