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October 16
Menu: Poëled Fowl, Cranberry Sauce; Mashed Potatoes; Cauliflower au Gratin; Tomato and Green Pepper Salad; Macaroon Custard; Queen Cakes; Coffee Queen Cakes-1/2 cup sugar, 1/2 cup Crisco, 1½ teaspoon salt, 3 eggs, 14 cup currants, 1/4 cup glace cherries (cut in dice), grate nutmeg, thin rind 12 lemon (chopped finely), juice 1 lemon, 1 cup up flour, 4 tablespoons rice flour, and 1 teaspoon baking powder. Put Crisco and sugar in basin and work with wooden spoon to cream, add salt and eggs 1 by 1, and beat mixture thoroughly. Mix in separate basin fruit, lemon rind, flours and baking powder. Stir this into other mixture, add nutmeg, and strained lemon juice. Stir mixture several minutes longer. Have ready Criscoed gem tins, three-parts fill them with mixture and bake fairly hot oven from 20 to 25 minutes. Unmold cakes and place on sieve to cool. Cakes may be coated with chocolate or boiled frosting.
A small, rich currant-and-cherry cake from Crisco's dinner calendar, baked in gem tins rather than as a loaf. A few of the printed quantities need judgment before you start.
- SaltOne and a half teaspoons of salt in a cake built on half a cup of sugar is far out of proportion, and reads as a misprint for a fraction; a quarter to half teaspoon suits this quantity of batter.
- The fruit measuresThe currant quantity as printed reads as a whole number where a fraction belongs; a quarter cup matches the quarter cup of cherries and the size of the batter. Toss both in a little of the measured flour so they do not sink.
- LemonUse the thin rind of half a lemon, pared with a peeler so you take no white pith, and chop it fine. The juice goes in last and strained, so no pips reach the tins.
- FlourAbout one cup of soft flour plus four tablespoons of rice flour. The rice flour is not filler -- it gives a short, slightly sandy crumb, and cornstarch is a poorer substitute.
- "Fairly hot oven"The book gives no temperatures; around 375F is the usual modern reading. Twenty to twenty-five minutes, as directed, suits tins filled three-quarters full.
- Crisco and the tins"Criscoed" simply means greased with shortening. Let the Crisco come to room temperature before you work it with the sugar, and beat until genuinely pale.
- Adding the eggsThree eggs into half a cup of fat will curdle if they go in fast. One at a time with hard beating between, as directed, and a spoonful of the measured flour if it looks broken.
- YieldAbout a dozen small cakes, depending on tin size. They cool on a sieve so steam escapes from the base and the crust stays short.
Queen cakes are an English small cake of long standing, made from the same creamed pound-cake batter as their larger relatives and traditionally baked in little fluted or heart-shaped tins -- the name is generally traced to that courtly, individually moulded presentation rather than to any particular queen. Rice flour and currants were both standard in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century versions, so the recipe reached this early Crisco promotional book largely intact from British household cookery. What changed is the fat: The Story of Crisco was published to encourage cooks to use hydrogenated cottonseed oil in place of butter and lard in exactly such heritage recipes, and a calendar of dinners -- an arrangement found in Crisco cookbooks, though the date of the edition is uncertain -- assigned one to every day of the year, this one to October 17.