Sift
Cream Crisco and sugar together, then add well beaten eggs. dry ingredients, and add to first mixture alternately with milk. Divide into Criscoed and floured gem pans and bake in moderately hot oven fifteen minutes.
Sufficient for fifteen cakes.
Cakes 4 eggs 1 cupful sugar
The page has come down to us garbled — the ingredient list is truncated to "4 eggs, 1 cupful sugar" and the sifting instruction that gave the section its heading has been cut adrift from the method. Read it as a template for a plain creamed butter-cake baked in muffin tins rather than a set of working quantities.
- The missing quantitiesCrisco, flour, milk and leavening all had amounts in the original book that are absent here. A cake of this type built on 4 eggs and 1 cup sugar would take roughly a cup of shortening, 2 to 3 cups of flour, a scant cup of milk and 2 to 3 teaspoons baking powder, but that is inference, not what the page says. Work from a complete recipe if you want reliable results.
- Gem pansA gem pan is a heavy cast-iron muffin pan, with oval or round cups. A standard 12-cup muffin tin is the direct substitute; the yield of fifteen suggests cups a little smaller than today's.
- "Criscoed and floured"Grease with solid shortening and dust with flour, tapping out the excess. Paper liners were unlikely to be in ordinary domestic use in 1913 and will change the crust.
- Moderately hot oven375 to 400F. Fifteen minutes at that heat is right for small cakes in metal pans; test with a skewer at twelve minutes, since gem pans of the period were heavier and slower than modern tinned steel.
- The sifting the title refers to"Sift" appears to be the head of the vanished line, presumably sift the flour with leavening and salt before adding, though the page does not say so. Thorough sifting helps keep the crumb even rather than streaked with pockets of leavening.
- Creaming with shorteningCrisco behaves differently from butter when creamed. Have it at room temperature and beat until visibly lightened before the eggs go in, or the batter is more likely to separate when the milk is added alternately with the flour.
- YieldFifteen small cakes. Cakes of this kind stale quickly and are best eaten the day they are made.
The Story of Crisco was published by Procter & Gamble in 1913, two years after Crisco itself went on sale, with recipes by the Scottish-born cookery writer Marion Harris Neil. Crisco was hydrogenated cottonseed oil — a solid white fat that behaved like lard but was made from a crop the South already grew in enormous quantity, and it was marketed hard as a modern, odourless, kosher-friendly alternative to both lard and butter. That marketing is visible in the verb: the pans are not greased, they are "Criscoed." The recipe's plain creamed method, with dry ingredients and milk added alternately, was standard American practice by the 1910s and had been set out in books like Fannie Farmer's a generation earlier.