Blitz Forte: or, It's as quick as a snap if you have modern electrical appliances!

This is the only recipe in the book with the name in quotation marks.

"Blitz Forte" ½ c butter* 1½ c sugar, divided into ½ and 1 cup 1 c flour (well-sifted) 4 eggs, separated 6 tbsp milk 1½ tsp baking powder Whipped cream for serving Heat oven to 300°. Grease a 9" square pan. Beat the egg yolks well, set aside. Cream the butter and ½ cup sugar together, beating until light. Add the well-beaten egg yolks and baking powder. Mix well. Alternately add the flour and the milk. Spread the cake batter into the pan. (It will be thin.) Set aside. In a separate bowl, beat the egg whites until light. Add the remaining 1 cup sugar, a little at a time, beating constantly until stiff and glossy. Spread the egg whites on top of the batter. Bake for 30 minutes. When cold, cut into squares and serve with whipped cream. Or, top with berries and cream for a shortcake. Delicious. *Add ¼ tsp salt if the butter is unsalted. Mrs. W. C. Dickey, Woman's Club of Fort Worth Cook Book (Fort Worth, Texas), 1928

This looked like one of those recipes where you're really glad you got everything ready before you began.

Before one begins the Blitz Forte, one must separate eggs. As you likely know, you really want to crack each egg white into, allowing you to ensure that each one is 100% yolk-free before allowing it to join the others. We therefore needed one little bowl for the yolks, another for the whites, and a bigger bowl for the successfully-separated egg whites. Ordinarily this doesn't matter. But today, we could use the smaller egg white bowl for holding the pre-measured milk after separating the eggs. We may have a dishwasher at hand, but I still love any chance to reduce dirty dishes.

Pictured: economizing on dishwasher space!

I saw no point in beating the yolks, but Mrs. W. C. Dickey must have put that in the directions for a reason. As far as I can tell, we beat the egg yolks so they won't slip neatly out of the bowl, but instead leave an eggy residue behind. I didn't mind giving the dishwasher a little more egg to clean, but I was mildly miffed at the waste.

I rarely bother to sift flour (I know a few experts out there are horrified at the thought), but let the record show that I did indeed use a sifter after Mrs W. C. Dickey told us to.

At this point, we arrive at a slight conflict between recipe ingredients and instructions. The ingredients call for 6 tablespoons of milk which never get mentioned in the directions. I hazarded a guess that the milk was meant for the base layer and not the meringue. I've only seen milk go into whipped egg whites once, and that was the unexpectedly good diet mint pie. And that recipe used a lot of milk powder, so it basically contained milk concentrate instead of milk as it comes from the cow. 

In the Blitz Forte, all the flour-sifting and yolk-beating made the recipe seem like the work of someone who took every cooking commandment in her Home Economics textbook to heart. And as anyone who ever got a half-hour classroom critique on her white sauce can tell you, a meringue contains egg whites, sugar, a pinch of salt if you're daring, a splash of vanilla if you're sacreligious, and nothing else.

This part of a Blitz Forte looks like a cake batter, which made me wonder why the Blitz Forte is in the pie chapter.

Because the Blitz Forte recipe produced a tiny amount of batter even for a halved recipe, I got out the smallest pan in the house. As you can see by how paltry and puny the batter looks in the pan before spreading it out, I clearly made the right choice.

Now that the cake batter was made and gently coaxed into covering the entire greased pan, we could commence beating the egg whites. However, all this planning and preparation proved a waste of time. These two puny egg whites produced a lot more meringue than I expected. 

Now, one might think that in an era when you can get an electric mixer for nearly nothing at a thrift store, it's a lot easier to turn even the tiniest of egg whites into a cloud of meringue that would be the envy of every rival hostess in 1928. After all, in those days, electric mixers were still astonishingly expensive.

Fort Worth (Texas) Star-Telegram, May 1 1933, page 12

As you can see, a mixer cost so much that they had to offer monthly payment plans in order to get the things out of the store. In case you're wondering, the price for that mixer adjusted for inflation is about $450 as of this writing, or almost two KitchenAids. 

Despite the price, I would wager that Mrs. W. C. Dickey had a stand mixer, even at 1928 prices. Take a look at this photo of the clubhouse from the front page of the book. I showed this to someone else who happened to be in the kitchen, and he said "Yeah, she could afford an electric mixer."

The club is so big they probably had to use a banquet camera to get all of it in the frame.

Back to the Blitz Forte. Now that we had an electrically astonishing amount of meringue, we had to bake it all. Hoping that mixing a little cooking spray into the cake batter wouldn't hurt anything, I transferred the batter into a larger pan. As you can see, a lot of delicate spatula work was required to persuade the batter to cover that vast acreage of sheet metal.

When I saw how much the meringue filled the empty space, I knew I was right to re-pan the cake batter. We have already plum-feta'd our way through self-sabotage by incorrect pan size. I would rather waste dishwasher space on an unused pan than deal with another pan-related baking misfire.

Gorsh, it was even puffier after it baked!

As you can see, the Blitz Forte collapsed a bit as it cooled. You should also know that people were slipping into the kitchen and "furtively" breaking off fragments of that lightly-golden crisp shell that floated on top.

I wasn't worried about the collapsed and unfortunate appearance of the Blitz Forte after it cooled. Mrs. W. C. Dickey already had a plan for that: whipped cream! As may others have noted before me, whipped cream covers a multitude of sins. But before we dress the Blitz Forte, let's see what we lifted out of the pan.

I did not expect that cracker-thin layer of cake batter to puff up into such a perfect-looking cake! Maybe the meringue insulated the batter enough to let the baking powder really push it upward before it finally set. Or maybe sifting the flour paid off.

But as successful (if not presentational) our Blitz Forte is, Mrs. W. C. Dickey does not think we're done yet. We have fruits to cut up. I love how the recipe says that if desired, we can "use for short cake with berries and cream." I didn't know that shortcakes used to be a common course when serving meals. Did people used to have main dish, salad, shortcake, and dessert?

At any rate, we have not served shortcake in so long that clearly we were overdue, so I got some fruits. Therefore, the Blitz Forte is not a dessert but a shortcake. 

I've always heard it's easier to peel kiwis with a spoon than with even the sharpest of knives, and it turns out that is correct. Look at how well we did on only our third try!

It gets hard to detach the skin from the kiwi when you get to the stem. Unless there's a counterintuitive kiwi-destemming trick I don't know about, I suggest you just chop it off and accept the minor loss of fruit. I tried to carefully excise the stem, and ended up taking a lot of fruit with it. We did not attempt this twice.

And so, with the Blitz Forte baked, the fruit washed and cut, and the whipped cream purchased, we could at last dig in! Everything about this is perfect. We have a dense yet not heavy cake at the bottom, a marshmallowy puff of meringue on top, and a lightly crisp layer of egg whites between the soft meringue and the cloud of whipped cream and the fresh fruits. Maybe you don't strictly need fruit on top of everything else, but it took perfection and made it better. Everyone who tried this was briefly at a loss for words. 

In other words, this recipe is absolutely wonderful. And, assuming you don't have to pay 1928 prices for an electric mixer, it's so easy and quick to make. After eating most of the Blitz Forte in an embarrassingly short time, we did agree that it would be even better with a bit of lemon in the cake. But this is so good that you needn't go out and buy lemon extract if you didn't have any.

In the event that we have company over who I actually like, I very well might make the Blitz Forte for them. It's a happy cloud of dessert bliss.