Lunch Cakes
1 scant cupful sugar. 6 tablespoonfuls Crisco 1 cupful milk 2 eggs 2 cupfuls flour 3 teaspoonfuls baking powder 1 teaspoonful salt 1 teaspoonful vanilla extract
A bare ingredient list from a promotional cookbook, with the method left to the cook's judgment. Two things need saying before anything else: there is no sugar in the list as printed, and no oven instruction at all.
- The missing sugarEvery other element here is a plain creamed butter-cake formula, and such a batter takes roughly a cup of sugar to two cups of flour. The list as printed omits it entirely, almost certainly a typesetting loss rather than an intentionally unsweetened cake. Treat the quantity as unknown rather than assuming.
- CriscoAn all-vegetable hydrogenated shortening, still sold and still behaving much as it did, though reformulated in the 2000s to remove trans fats. Six tablespoonfuls is 3/8 cup; modern shortening creams a little stiffer, so start it at room temperature.
- Implied methodNo method is printed. The list order suggests the usual sequence: cream the fat, beat in the eggs, then add the sifted dry ingredients alternately with the milk, vanilla last. Nothing in this formula rewards long beating after the flour goes in.
- The flourHousehold flour of this period was often softer and lower in protein than modern all-purpose. Spoon and level rather than scooping, or the batter will come out dry and tight.
- SaltA full teaspoonful against two cups of flour reads high to a modern palate, particularly alongside whatever salt is in the baking powder. Half that is closer to current practice.
- OvenNo oven instruction is given. For a modern range, 375F is the usual figure for cupcakes and gem-pan cakes, with 18 to 22 minutes as a working range.
- Pans and yieldNeither pan nor yield is given. 'Lunch cakes' most likely means small individual cakes, which would be baked in gem pans, the ancestor of the muffin tin. This quantity of batter should fill roughly a dozen standard cups.
The Story of Crisco was published by Procter & Gamble in 1913, two years after the company introduced hydrogenated cottonseed oil as a household cooking fat, and the recipes in it were assembled by Marion Harris Neil, then cookery editor of the Ladies' Home Journal. The book's purpose was frankly commercial: to show that a shelf-stable vegetable fat could stand in for butter and lard in every department of the kitchen, cakes included, and Crisco leads the ingredient list here as it does throughout much of the volume. "Lunch cakes" were plain small cakes meant for the lunch pail or the school basket, sturdy enough to travel and cheap enough to make often. Part of the argument P&G was making to American housekeepers in the years before refrigeration was general was that the shortening kept better in a warm pantry than butter did.