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Almond Pudding
Beat separately yolks of 2 eggs and whites of 3, and mix to a cream with 4 tablespoons ground almonds, 4 tablespoons sugar, and 4 tablespoons Crisco. Mix in a wineglass of sherry, and pour into a Criscoed mold ornamented with nuts. Bake it, and serve hot.
A small, rich almond sponge baked in a mold — closer to an English baked pudding than to anything creamy. The original assumes a cook who knows her oven, so the numbers below fill in the gaps.
- Oven and timingNo temperature is given: bake at 350F. A pudding of this size in a 3- to 4-cup mold takes roughly 30 to 40 minutes, until set at the centre and just pulling from the sides. Setting the mold in a pan of hot water keeps the edges from drying before the middle cooks.
- CriscoFour tablespoons is 1/4 cup of vegetable shortening. Modern Crisco has been reformulated to cut trans fats and is not identical to the 1910s product, but it behaves the same here; unsalted butter gives more flavour.
- A wineglass of sherryIn period usage a wineglass is about 2 fluid ounces, roughly 4 tablespoons. That is a great deal of liquid for this quantity of batter — add it gradually once the fat, sugar and almonds are creamed, or the mixture will separate.
- Ground almondsAlmond flour or almond meal. There is no wheat flour at all, so the almonds are the entire structure alongside the eggs; fine-ground blanched almond flour gives a smoother pudding, meal a coarser one.
- The egg count is deliberateThe egg count -- Two yolks and three whites, beaten separately, is what the text specifies; with no flour and no leavening, the beaten whites are the only lift the batter has. Whip the whites to soft peaks and fold them in gently.
- Ornamenting the moldGrease the mold, then press whole or split nuts against the bottom and sides before the batter goes in, so they set into the surface if the pudding is turned out.
- YieldSmall: two to three servings, or four in a set of ramekins baked about 20 minutes. Serve hot as directed, since it firms and dries as it cools.
A Calendar of Dinners was one of the recipe books Procter & Gamble published to promote Crisco after its introduction in 1911, which is why shortening appears in a dessert where an older cookbook would have called for butter — and why the mold is "Criscoed" rather than simply greased. The pudding itself is much older than the fat: flourless baked almond puddings bound with eggs and sweetened wine appear in English and Anglo-American cookery from the seventeenth century onward, drawing on the medieval kitchen's heavy reliance on ground almonds. Sack or sherry was one of the common flavourings for such puddings, alongside rosewater and orange-flower water, and the instruction to bake in an ornamented mold and serve hot suits a period when a turned-out pudding was expected to look like something as well as taste of it.