Sand Cake
1 cupful sugar 1 cupful Crisco 1 teaspoonful salt 5 eggs ½ lb. corn starch 1 teaspoonful lemon extract Cream Crisco and salt, add sugar by tablespoonfuls, beating all the time, then add the corn starch by tablespoonfuls, lemon extract and lastly whites of eggs beaten to a stiff froth. Turn into a papered cake tin and bake in moderate oven for three-quarters of an hour. Sufficient for one cake.
The ingredient list as printed in The Story of Crisco is incomplete — the quantities of Crisco, sugar and salt have dropped out, and the starch figure looks like a typesetting error. Read the method first, then reconstruct the proportions from a standard Sandtorte before you start.
- The missing quantitiesThe method calls for creaming Crisco with salt, then sugar, then cornstarch, but only the eggs, starch and lemon extract survive in the list. Sandtorte formulas commonly use roughly equal weights of fat, sugar and starch, on the order of ½ lb each to 5 eggs. 1½ lb of cornstarch looks like an error; at that quantity the batter would be a dry, unworkable mass.
- What happens to the yolksOnly the stiffly beaten whites are accounted for. In comparable recipes the yolks are usually worked in during the creaming stage, after the sugar. That is almost certainly where they belong here; discarding them would leave the cake short of liquid and richness.
- Cornstarch instead of flourThis is a pure starch cake, no wheat flour at all, which is where the "sand" texture comes from. It is gluten-free by accident of tradition, and it is also fragile — fold the whites in and stop as soon as they disappear.
- Moderate oven350°F. Three-quarters of an hour is realistic for a single loaf or round tin; check at 35 minutes with a skewer, since a starch batter dries quickly once set.
- Papered cake tinLine the tin with parchment rather than greasing alone. Starch cakes stick and tear, and the paper lets you lift the cake out while it is still warm and delicate.
- Creaming vegetable shorteningCrisco was new when this book appeared and does not soften or aerate on the same schedule as butter. Beat it at room temperature for several minutes before the sugar goes in, and expect a whiter, slightly lighter crumb than a butter version.
- Lemon extractA teaspoon of extract is typical of recipes of this date; the finely grated zest of one lemon gives a cleaner flavour in a cake this plain, where there is nothing else to hide behind.
- Yield"Sufficient for one cake" means a single loaf or round tin; the recipe gives no size or slice count, and specifies no icing or accompaniment.
Sand cake is the English name for the German Sandtorte or Sandkuchen, a nineteenth-century keeping cake built on potato starch or cornstarch rather than flour, the name customarily explained by its fine, faintly gritty crumb that crumbles like damp sand. It travelled into American and British cookbooks through German immigrant kitchens and appears in household manuals, usually in the plain-cake section alongside pound cake, which it resembles in proportion. It turns up in The Story of Crisco by Procter & Gamble in 1913 to persuade cooks that hydrogenated vegetable shortening could replace butter and lard — where a cake with almost no flavouring beyond lemon makes a hard test for a new fat. The garbled ingredient list is a reminder that these advertising cookbooks were assembled quickly and proofread loosely.