Marmalade Cake
1/2 cupful sugar ½ cupful Crisco 1 cupful marmalade 1/2 teaspoonful salt 1 egg 2 cupfuls flour 11/½ teaspoonfuls baking powder 1/2 teaspoonful powdered ginger Sift salt, flour, and baking powder into basin, rub in Crisco with finger tips, add ginger and egg well beaten. Knead lightly to smooth paste and divide into two pieces. Roll out pieces and line Criscoed dinner plate with one of them. Spread over with marmalade, cover with remaining piece of paste, pinch neatly round the edges and bake in moderate oven half an hour. Cut like pie and serve hot or cold.
Sufficient for eight pieces.
Cakes
This is a shortcrust pastry tart baked on a plate rather than a cake in the modern sense, and the ingredient list has suffered in transcription. Read the amounts carefully before you start.
- The baking powder figure is garbledThe Crisco quantity was checked against the printed page and reads ½ cupful, which suits 2 cupfuls of flour for a short pastry of this type. The baking powder, printed as "11/½", is 1½ teaspoonfuls.
- The sugar never appears in the methodHalf a cupful is listed and then never used. Rub or sift it in with the dry ingredients if you want a sweet crust; the marmalade alone will carry the tart if you leave it out.
- CriscoHydrogenated vegetable shortening, still sold and still behaving the same way in pastry: it stays plastic over a wide temperature range and makes a tender, slightly crumbly crust. Modern Crisco is reformulated to remove trans fats but handles identically here. Equal weight of chilled butter or lard works, with a tablespoon or two of cold water if the dough will not come together.
- Moderate oven350F. Half an hour will set the pastry and colour the edges; the filling is already cooked, so you are baking the crust only.
- "Criscoed dinner plate"Baking a tart on a plate was a common British practice, and a shallow enamel or heavy china plate would serve. A 9-inch pie plate or metal tart tin is a close equivalent, greased the same way.
- Knead lightlyThe hinge of the whole thing. This is a rubbed-in pastry with egg as the only liquid, and working it past the point where it holds together makes it tough. Bring it to a smooth mass and stop.
- MarmaladeThe recipe does not specify a type; a thick-cut Seville is bitter and sweet at once and stands up to the ginger. Spread it to within half an inch of the rim or it will boil out at the seam.
- YieldEight wedges, as stated. Better on the day it is baked; the pastry softens under the filling by the second day.
The Story of Crisco was published by Procter & Gamble in the 1910s to teach cooks what to do with a new product: a solid white shortening made from cottonseed oil by hydrogenation, sold as a clean, odourless, keeping alternative to lard and butter. The recipes in it are conventional Anglo-American home baking with the fat swapped in, and this one is essentially a British plate tart of the kind that turns a jar of preserve into a pudding for eight. Marmalade and ginger are a familiar pairing in British baking.