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Almond and Apple Pudding
Pare and core 6 apples, chop into small pieces and sprinkle with 1/2 cup sugar. Have ready 2 cups breadcrumbs, soaked in 1/2 cup milk to which 1 tablespoon melted Crisco has been added. Beat 2 eggs till light, add to them grating of nutmeg, a pinch of cinnamon and good pinch of salt. Mix apple with soaked breadcrumbs, then eggs, and lastly 2 dozens blanched almonds chopped fine. Thin with 1/2 cup milk, then pour into Criscoed tin and bake. Serve with sweetened cream.
A plain bread-and-apple pudding enriched with egg and almond. The original assumes you know your own oven and your own pudding dish, so the two things it omits are heat and time.
- Oven and timeBake at 350F. In a shallow dish, 45 minutes is usually enough; in a deeper one, allow an hour, until the centre is set and a knife comes out clean rather than milky.
- The tin"Tin" here means any greased baking dish large enough to hold the mixture with room to spare. The batter is loose, so give it enough depth that it does not run over, but a shallower dish will set through more evenly than a deep one.
- CriscoCrisco was new when this book was written, and the book was written to sell it. A tablespoon of melted butter or any neutral oil does the same job; use butter for a better flavour.
- BreadcrumbsThese are soft crumbs torn from the inside of a loaf, not dry packaged crumbs. Dry crumbs will drink far more than the 1/2 cup of milk given and set up dense; if that is all you have, add milk until the mixture is thick but pourable.
- AlmondsTwo dozen blanched almonds is roughly 1/4 cup, about 1 oz. Sliced or slivered blanched almonds, chopped finer, work directly. Do not substitute bitter almonds or almond extract for the whole quantity.
- The applesSix apples pared and cored is about 2 lb, or 5 to 6 cups chopped. A firm tart variety keeps its shape; a soft one collapses into the crumbs, which is not a failure but gives a different pudding. Chop small, near 1/4 inch, since the baking time is set by the custard, not the fruit.
- Order of mixingFollow it as written. The crumbs are soaked in milk first so they swell before the egg goes in, and the almonds go in last so they stay distinct.
- ServingServes about 6. "Sweetened cream" is cold cream with a little sugar stirred in, most simply poured over rather than whipped.
A Calendar of Dinners was written by Marion Harris Neil and published by Procter & Gamble to promote Crisco, the hydrogenated vegetable shortening the company introduced in 1911; Neil also wrote The Story of Crisco for them. That accounts for the tablespoon of melted Crisco in a pudding that hardly needs fat at all, and for the verb "Criscoed" applied to the tin. The pudding itself is much older than the shortening: baked bread puddings stretched with fruit and bound with egg were a standard way of using stale loaves in English and American kitchens through the nineteenth century, and the almonds mark it as the dressier version of that thrift.