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Sauce (Tablespoonful flour cupful lb)
1 tablespoonful flour 1 cupful (1/2 lb.) maple sugar 1 egg 1 cupful boiling water For cake. Cream Crisco and sugar together, add egg well beaten, molasses, milk, soda, flour, salt, and spices. Mix and turn into Criscoed tin and bake in moderate oven forty minutes.
Cakes For sauce.
Dissolve maple sugar in boiling water. Rub together Crisco and flour. Add gradually boiling syrup; and lastly the beaten egg. Then return to fire and stir briskly until thickened. Sufficient for one small gingerbread.
The page as printed has collapsed two recipes into one: a gingerbread and the maple sauce meant to go over it. Only the sauce's ingredient list survives intact, and even that omits the Crisco, so treat the cake half as a fragment and use a gingerbread recipe you trust.
- The missing quantitiesThe cake method calls for Crisco, sugar, egg, molasses, milk, soda, flour, salt and spices, but no amounts appear anywhere on the page. There is no honest way to reconstruct them; make a known gingerbread and use the sauce as written.
- Crisco in the sauceThe sauce list gives flour, maple sugar, egg and water but no fat, though the method says to rub Crisco and flour together. No amount is given anywhere; a tablespoon of shortening or butter to the tablespoon of flour is a reasonable guess, not a reconstruction.
- Maple sugarA cupful is given as half a pound, which is granulated maple sugar, not maple syrup. If you substitute syrup, use about 3/4 cup and cut the boiling water back, since syrup already carries water.
- Moderate ovenAround 350F for the gingerbread. No tin size is given on the page, so judge the forty minutes against whatever tin you use.
- "Criscoed tin"Simply greased with shortening. Crisco was new when this book appeared and the verb was part of the sales pitch; a greased and floured or parchment-lined tin does the same work.
- The hinge: the eggAdd the beaten egg off the heat, after the boiling syrup has been stirred into the flour and fat, then return the pan to a low flame. Stir constantly and pull it the moment it coats the spoon. Brought to a boil the egg curdles and the sauce turns grainy.
- YieldThe page says only that it is sufficient for one small gingerbread. It thickens as it cools and can be loosened with a spoonful of hot water.
The Story of Crisco (1913) was published by Procter & Gamble to teach American cooks what to do with a wholly new product: hydrogenated cottonseed oil, sold as a shelf-stable substitute for lard and butter. Nearly every recipe in it is an ordinary domestic dish with the fat swapped out and the brand name turned into a verb, which is why the tins are "Criscoed" rather than greased. Gingerbread with a hot sweet sauce was standard New England and Midwestern home baking long before 1913, and maple sugar was the cheap sweetener in maple country, sold in cakes and grated or dissolved as needed; using it in a boiled sauce thickened with flour and egg is a thrifty variation on the hard sauces and lemon sauces served with the same cake. The garbled state of this particular page is a reminder that these promotional cookbooks were set quickly and reprinted often, and that the scans we read today sometimes preserve the errors rather than the recipe.