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Silver Nut Cake
1 cupful sugar. 1/2 cupful Crisco. 4 whites of eggs. ½ teaspoonful vanilla extract 2 cupfuls flour ½ teaspoonful salt 3 teaspoonfuls baking powder 1 cupful chopped pecans or English walnut meats ½ cupful milk Cream Crisco and sugar. Sift dry ingredients and add to Crisco mixture, alternating with the milk; add nuts and vanilla extract. Beat egg whites to stiff froth and fold in at last. Turn into Criscoed and floured cake tin and bake in moderate oven thirty-five minutes. Sufficient for one small cake.
A period white cake built on hydrogenated shortening rather than butter. The transcription as printed is incomplete, so read the notes before shopping.
- Missing quantitiesThe instructions call for Crisco, sugar and egg whites, but no amounts for them survive in the ingredient list. Comparable silver cakes of this era used roughly ⅔ cup shortening, 1½ cups sugar and 4 egg whites to 2 cups flour; treat that as an inference, not the book's figure.
- 1½ teaspoonful saltPossibly a typesetting error for ½ teaspoon; a full 1½ teaspoons in a two-cup white cake reads as salty. The 1½ cupfuls milk is also high against 2 cups flour and gives a very loose batter; 1 cup is closer to the norm for the style.
- Moderate oven350F. Thirty-five minutes suits a single 8-inch layer or a small loaf; test with a skewer at 30 minutes, since a batter this wet can read done on the surface first.
- "Criscoed" tinGrease with the shortening itself, then dust with flour; a parchment round in the base is a fair substitute.
- Creaming solid shorteningCrisco creams best around 70F, softer than cold butter but not melting. Beat with the sugar until visibly pale and increased in volume — this is the only aeration the cake gets beyond the baking powder and whites.
- Folding the whitesBeat to stiff froth, meaning firm but not dry and crumbling, and fold in with as few strokes as will incorporate them. Streaks of white are preferable to a deflated batter.
- NutsChopped fine and tossed in a spoonful of the measured flour so they suspend rather than sink. Pecans give the sweeter, softer crumb; walnuts a slight tannic edge.
- Yield"One small cake" is about one 8-inch layer, eight modest slices. No icing is specified, though a boiled white icing is the period partner.
"Silver cake" is the white half of a Victorian and Edwardian pair: the whites went into the silver cake, the yolks into a gold cake baked alongside, so no part of the egg was wasted. Adding chopped nuts made it a "nut cake," a common American variation of the day. Its appearance in The Story of Crisco — the promotional cookbook Procter & Gamble issued for its hydrogenated vegetable shortening, introduced in 1911 — is deliberate: a snow-white crumb was the best possible advertisement for a fat with no colour and no dairy flavour of its own, and the book repeatedly nudges cooks to replace butter and lard with it, including in the greasing of the tin.