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Peach Shortcake
3/4 cupful Crisco 1 teaspoonful baking powder ½ teaspoonful salt 1 teaspoonful almond extract Quartered peaches Cream Crisco and sugar together, then add milk, eggs one by one, always beating well between each one, flour sifted with baking powder and salt, then add extract. Mix and divide into two layer tins that have been greased with Crisco and bake twenty minutes in moderate oven. Turn out and spread with butter. Put together with quartered and sweetened peaches and pile some peaches on top. Sufficient for one cake.
The ingredient list as printed is incomplete — sugar, milk, eggs and flour all appear in the method but never got their quantities into the column. Treat this as a standard two-layer butter cake and work from the proportions below.
- The missing quantitiesThe original omits amounts for sugar, milk, eggs and flour. A workable reconstruction for a 3/4-cup fat base is about 1 1/2 cups sugar, 3 cups flour, 1 cup milk and 3 eggs; that is a guess, not what the book says. If you want fidelity to the printed page, there is nothing to be faithful to on those four lines.
- The salt is almost certainly wrongThe salt -- One and a half teaspoons reads high for a sweet layer cake, though with the flour quantity missing there is no way to check it. Half to one teaspoon is the safer choice.
- LeaveningOne teaspoon of baking powder for a two-layer cake is light by modern standards. Two teaspoons gives the rise a modern cook expects.
- CriscoStill sold, though reformulated since 1913 — the original was hydrogenated cottonseed oil, today's is a soybean and palm blend with far less trans fat. Any solid vegetable shortening works; butter substitutes cup for cup and tastes better, at the cost of a slightly less tender crumb.
- Moderate ovenConventionally read today as about 350F; the book gives no figure. Twenty minutes is right for two 8- or 9-inch layers — test at eighteen, since a shortening cake dries quickly once past done.
- Almond extractA full teaspoon is assertive by current taste and will dominate ripe peaches. Half a teaspoon, or a mix of almond and vanilla, sits better.
- Buttering the layersThe instruction to spread butter on the turned-out cake echoes older shortcake practice. Do it while the layers are still warm so it soaks in.
- The peachesQuarter, sugar and let them sit twenty to thirty minutes so they release juice, then assemble just before serving. Assembled early, the buttered crumb turns to paste.
- YieldOne two-layer cake, eight to ten servings.
The Story of Crisco (1913) was written by Marion Harris Neil for Procter & Gamble, two years after the company introduced Crisco as the first widely marketed hydrogenated vegetable shortening. The book's job was to persuade cooks that a manufactured fat could replace lard and butter in everything, which is why the brand name appears in the ingredient list of nearly every recipe and again in the instruction to grease the tins. The dish itself sits at a fork in American usage: shortcake had long meant a rich biscuit dough split and filled with fruit, but by this period a butter-cake version was common enough that the two coexisted under one name, and a promotional cookbook had obvious reasons to prefer the version that used three-quarters of a cup of the product. Peaches, cheap and abundant in late summer, were a natural partner — strawberry shortcake's second season.