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October 11
Menu: Roast Veal; Mashed Sweet Potatoes; Green Beans; Stuffed Beet Salad; Cheese Crackers; Dutch Apple Cake; Coffee; Mix Dutch Apple Cake-2 cups flour, 1 teaspoon salt, 3 teaspoons baking powder, 1 cup milk, 2 eggs, and 3 tablespoons melted Crisco. and sift dry ingredients. Add beaten yolks, Crisco and milk. Beat well; cut and fold in stiffly beaten whites. Spread mixture 1½ inch thick on Criscoed pans. Lay apples cut into eighths in 2 rows on top of dough. Sprinkle with sugar; bake in hot oven 30 minutes. Serve with lemon sauce.
A quick baking-powder batter cake, closer to a thick sweetened biscuit dough than a layer cake. The text as printed is garbled in a couple of places — the header line has run into the ingredient list and the word "Sift" has been swallowed — but the method is recoverable.
- The garbled first lineRead it as "Mix and sift dry ingredients": the ingredient list has been dropped in between the opening word "Mix" and the rest of the sentence. Then add the beaten yolks, melted shortening and milk.
- Hot ovenA "hot oven" in this period is generally reckoned at about 400-450F. Toward the upper end, 30 minutes suits a cake spread an inch and a half thick; check at 25.
- Crisco and "Criscoed pans"Crisco is hydrogenated vegetable shortening, still sold. Any solid vegetable shortening works, and melted butter gives better flavour. "Criscoed" simply means greased.
- Setting the applesPress the apple eighths into the batter cut-side down rather than laying them on top, or they slide off as the cake rises. Firm tart apples hold their shape best.
- SugarThe batter itself is unsweetened; all the sugar is the sprinkling over the apples. Use a generous two to three tablespoons, with cinnamon if you like, or the cake reads as savoury.
- Pan and yieldThe quantity is modest, so a 9x13 pan gives a much shallower layer than the 1 1/2 inches specified; a square pan comes closer to that depth. "Pans" plural in the original suggests shallow sheet pans; a single rectangular pan is simpler.
- Lemon sauceThe expected accompaniment is the standard cornstarch-thickened lemon sauce of the era — water, sugar, cornstarch, lemon juice and zest, finished with butter. It is not optional in spirit; the cake is dry on its own.
The Story of Crisco (1913) was written by Marion Harris Neil for Procter & Gamble, which had introduced Crisco two years earlier as the first widely marketed all-vegetable hydrogenated shortening, pitched against lard and butter on grounds of purity, digestibility and price. The book's "Calendar of Dinners" assigns a menu to every day of the year, and this apple cake belongs to October 12 — squarely in the American apple harvest. "Dutch" in such names is usually explained as German rather than Netherlandish — Deutsch/Deitsch taken up as Dutch — though that account is traditional rather than documented, and by this date "Dutch apple cake" was a common American recipe name rather than a specifically Pennsylvania German one. Recipes of this shape run through nineteenth-century American cookbooks well before Crisco existed; what the company supplied was the shortening and the pan grease, and the branding worked its way into the verbs.