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May 8
Menu: Cream of Beet Soup; Cold Pot Roast; Stuffed Potatoes; String Bean Salad Stewed Apricots; Black Chocolate Cake; Coffee Black Chocolate Cake-174 cups sugar, 2 eggs, 1/4 cup Crisco, 4 squares chocolate, 1½ cups flour, measured after sifting, 3 teaspoons baking powder, 1 teaspoon salt, 1/2 cup milk, and 1 teaspoon vanilla. Cream Crisco and sugar, add well beaten eggs, then chocolate melted, beat thoroughly. Sift salt and baking powder with flour and add alternating with milk to previous mixture. Add flavoring last and beat thoroughly before pouring into pan well greased with Crisco. Bake in a moderate oven about 40 minutes.
A plain one-bowl-style chocolate layer cake from the Crisco booklet, built on unsweetened baking chocolate rather than cocoa. A few of the measurements need translating before you start.
- The sugar quantityThe sugar figure has lost its fraction in printing. For a cake with 1½ cups flour, ¼ cup fat and 4 oz chocolate, 1¾ cups sugar is the proportion that fits; anything much less will leave the unsweetened chocolate harsh.
- Four squares chocolateA "square" is one ounce of unsweetened baking chocolate, so this is 4 oz — a genuinely dark, bitter-edged cake. Melt it over hot water and let it cool to barely warm before beating it into the creamed mixture, or it will melt the shortening and slacken the batter.
- Moderate oven"Moderate" is usually read as about 350F. The recipe names no pan or size, only a single greased pan; at that heat 40 minutes suits a single deep 8-inch round or a 9-inch square, and shallower layers would be done sooner.
- Crisco as the fatCrisco was then, and remains, an all-vegetable shortening. Quarter of a cup is a lean amount for this much flour and chocolate — the cocoa butter in the four squares is doing part of the work — so the crumb is firm and slightly dry rather than plush. An equal weight of any solid vegetable shortening behaves the same way.
- Salt and baking powderA full teaspoon of salt and 3 teaspoons of baking powder are both high by current practice; 1½ to 2 teaspoons of baking powder is nearer the modern proportion for 1½ cups flour, and ½ teaspoon salt is plenty. Period powders varied in type and strength, though double-acting products were already on the market by this date.
- Flour measured after siftingThis matters. Sift first, then spoon into the cup — roughly 5½ oz / 155 g for the 1½ cups. Scooping unsifted flour will add a third again as much and give a heavy cake.
- Greasing the panThe original assumes a plain greased tin. Grease and line the base with parchment; a batter this low in fat sticks.
- YieldServes 8 to 10 as a single cake. It is a cake meant to be iced, though the recipe itself specifies no frosting; a plain white or chocolate boiled frosting would suit.
The Story of Crisco (1913) was written by Marion Harris Neil to introduce American cooks to Procter & Gamble's hydrogenated cottonseed-oil shortening, launched in 1911 as a substitute for both lard and butter. Its "Calendar of Dinners" gave a menu for every day of the year — hence the "May 9" at the foot of this recipe — each anchored by dishes in which Crisco stood in for the animal fat a cook would otherwise have used. Unsweetened baking chocolate in one-ounce squares was a standard form of the period; boxed cocoa was also available.