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Whole Wheat Gingerbread
4 tablespoonfuls sugar ½ cupful Crisco 2 eggs 1 teaspoonful baking soda 1/4 cupful milk 2 cupfuls flour 2 cupfuls whole wheat flour ½ cupful seeded raisins ½ teaspoonful salt 1½ cupfuls molasses 1/2 cupful chopped nut meats 1 teaspoonful powdered ginger 1/2 teaspoonful powdered mace 1 teaspoonful powdered cinnamon 3 tablespoonfuls chopped candied lemon peel Mix flours, then add peel, raisins, nuts, spices, and salt. Melt Crisco, molasses, and sugar, then cool, and add them with eggs well beaten, with soda mixed with milk. Mix well and turn into Criscoed and floured cake tin. Bake in moderate oven one hour.
Sufficient for one large cake of gingerbread.
A dark, heavily fruited molasses cake from Procter & Gamble's Crisco promotional cookbook. The ingredient list as printed is riddled with the era's fraction typography, so read the quantities carefully before you start.
- The suspect fractionsEvery "1½" in this list is almost certainly a mangled "1/2" — half a cup of Crisco, half a cup of raisins, half a teaspoon of salt. The only quantity that plausibly reads as one and a half is the molasses, which drives the cake. Treating the shortening or the salt as 1½ cups would ruin it.
- CriscoCrisco was new when this book appeared and is still sold; any solid vegetable shortening works, and the recipe melts it anyway, so a neutral oil is a fair substitute by volume. "Criscoed and floured" simply means greased and floured.
- Moderate oven350F. With this much molasses and fruit the top browns early; if it colors before the center sets, tent it loosely with foil.
- The hinge: cool the melted mixtureThe instruction to cool the melted Crisco, molasses, and sugar before adding the eggs is not optional. Poured in hot, it will scramble the eggs.
- Soda and molassesOne teaspoon of soda is doing all the leavening, activated by the acidity of the molasses rather than by the milk. Dissolving it in the milk first spreads it evenly through a stiff batter; get the cake into the oven promptly once mixed.
- Flour and whole wheatEarly-1900s whole wheat flour was generally coarser and more variable than today's, and finer modern flour may take up liquid more readily, so the batter will thicken as it stands — expect a heavy, spoonable batter, not a pourable one, and add a spoonful more milk only if it will not spread in the tin.
- Candied lemon peelThree tablespoons chopped candied peel is easy to find at holiday season and easy to omit the rest of the year; grated fresh lemon zest gives the aroma without the sugar.
- Pan and yield"One large cake" means roughly a 9x13 pan or a large tube pan. One hour suits the 9x13; a deep tube pan may want 65-75 minutes. Test with a skewer in the center. It cuts better the next day and keeps a week wrapped.
The Story of Crisco (1913, with recipes credited to Marion Harris Neil) was written to teach American cooks what to do with an entirely new product: hydrogenated cottonseed oil, introduced by Procter & Gamble in 1911 as a replacement for lard and butter. Nearly every recipe in the book exists to demonstrate that the shortening can stand in wherever animal fat once went. The cake itself belongs to an older tradition — molasses gingerbread was the everyday sweet of nineteenth-century American kitchens, cheaper than a butter-and-sugar cake and leavened with soda against the acid of the syrup. The whole wheat flour reflects the period's enthusiasm for "entire wheat" baking, promoted by health reformers as more wholesome than white flour and fashionable enough by 1913 to earn a place in a corporate cookbook.<br><br>