Marble Cake
2 cupfuls sugar. 1 cupful Crisco. 3 1/2 cupfuls flour. 4 eggs. 1 cupful milk. 3 teaspoonfuls baking powder 2 tablespoonfuls molasses 2 tablespoonfuls melted chocolate 1 teaspoonful powdered cinnamon 1/2 teaspoonful grated nutmeg 1/2 teaspoonful powdered allspice 1 teaspoonful salt Cream Crisco, add gradually the sugar, yolks of eggs beaten until thick, flour, salt, baking powder, milk, and egg whites beaten to stiff froth. Mix carefully and to one-third the mixture add spices, molasses, and melted chocolate. Drop in Criscoed cake pan alternately a spoonful of each mixture, and draw spoon through once or twice to make colors lie in lines. Bake in moderately hot oven one hour.
Sufficient for one medium-sized cake.
The ingredient list as printed is incomplete — the quantities of Crisco, sugar, eggs, flour and milk have dropped out, though the method calls for all of them. What survives is the spice-and-chocolate formula for the dark batter and the marbling technique.
- The missing quantitiesOnly the leavening, flavourings and salt are given. A standard cake of this era and size runs to about 1/2 cup shortening, 1 1/2 cups sugar, 3 eggs, 3 cups flour and 1 cup milk, but that is reconstruction, not what the book says. Use a modern one-bowl marble cake formula for the pale batter and take the spice mixture below from here.
- CriscoedThe book uses the product name as a verb: grease the pan with vegetable shortening.
- Melted chocolateIn 1913 this means unsweetened baking chocolate, two tablespoons melted being roughly one ounce. Cocoa powder is not a straight swap; it absorbs liquid and will stiffen the dark third noticeably.
- Moderately hot ovenThe book gives no temperatures; 'moderately hot' is conventionally read as somewhere around 375-400F. An hour at that heat suits a deep tube or loaf pan; in a shallower 9-inch pan check at 35 to 40 minutes.
- One teaspoonful saltHigh by modern taste for a single cake, particularly alongside 3 teaspoons baking powder. Half a teaspoon is plenty unless the shortening is unsalted and the batter large.
- MarblingThe hinge is restraint: alternate spoonfuls, then draw the spoon through once or twice and stop. More stirring than that greys the whole cake. The dark batter is heavier from the molasses and chocolate, so it sinks slightly — deposit it in smaller spoonfuls than the light.
- Beaten whitesThe whites go in last and are folded, not beaten in, despite the recipe listing them in the same breath as the flour and milk. With 3 teaspoons of baking powder already present the cake will rise regardless; overworking the whites simply toughens it.
- YieldOne medium cake, baked in a single pan as directed; with the quantities missing from the printed list, the exact pan size and serving count cannot be fixed from the text.
Marble cake was an American household staple long before Crisco existed — nineteenth-century books give it with butter, and the dark half is often spiced and molassed rather than chocolate. This version uses both. Its appearance in The Story of Crisco (1913) is the point of the book: Procter & Gamble had a hydrogenated cottonseed-oil shortening to sell and needed to show it doing everything butter and lard did, so the volume works methodically through the standard repertoire of the period, cakes included, with the product name inserted as ingredient and verb alike. The claim implicitly made by a marble cake is a good one for a new fat: the batter has to cream well, hold two colours in suspension, and bake without greasy streaks.