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Baked Macaroni Pudding
1 pint milk, 4 long sticks macaroni, 1 egg, 2 tablespoons sugar, nutmeg, 1 tablespoon Crisco, and salt to taste.
Break macaroni into 1/2 inch lengths. Boil milk, shake in macaroni and salt and boil it very slowly for 1/2 an hour, or until quite tender, and keep it well stirred during cooking. Thickly Crisco a pudding dish and beat up egg. Add sugar and Crisco to macaroni, let it cool a little, then pour in egg and mix it well. Grate little nutmeg on top and bake pudding very slowly until top is delicately browned.
A plain milk-and-macaroni pudding of the sort that sat between nursery food and dessert. Two things decide whether it works: the macaroni must cook entirely in the milk, and the custard must never be rushed in the oven.
- "4 long sticks macaroni"Macaroni was once sold as long straight tubes, roughly the length of spaghetti, rather than short elbows. Four of them come to perhaps 2 ounces (55 g) dry, which is about as much as a pint of milk will comfortably carry. Broken elbows or ditalini measured to weight are the closest substitute.
- CriscoThe book was written to sell it, and here it is simply the fat. One tablespoon of butter does the same job in the pudding and for greasing the dish, with better flavour.
- Boil it very slowlyMilk scorches on the bottom long before macaroni softens. Use a heavy pan over low heat, stir often as instructed, and expect the milk to thicken markedly as starch leaches out. If it tightens too far before the pasta is tender, loosen with a splash more milk.
- Let it cool a littleThis is the hinge. Pour beaten egg into near-boiling macaroni and it scrambles into threads. Let the mixture drop to hand-warm, then stir the egg in.
- "Bake very slowly"A slow oven of this period is usually reckoned somewhere between 275 and 300F (140-150C). Reckon on 35 to 45 minutes, until the custard is just set at the centre and the top is faintly coloured. A water bath is not called for but will insure against curdling.
- SeasoningTwo tablespoons of sugar for a pint of milk gives a barely sweet pudding by modern taste. Three or four is closer to what most people now expect of a dessert; leave it at two if serving it as a side to stewed fruit.
- YieldFills a small 1-quart dish and serves three to four. Good warm, and firm enough to spoon out cold the next day.
A Calendar of Dinners belongs to a genre that flourished in the 1910s: the cookbook published by a manufacturer to teach cooks a new ingredient, in this case the hydrogenated vegetable shortening Crisco, introduced by Procter & Gamble in 1911. That is why a tablespoon of shortening turns up in a milk pudding where an English cook would simply have used butter, and why the verb "to Crisco" a dish appears without apology. The pudding itself is much older than the book. Baked macaroni in sweetened milk with egg and nutmeg is generally traced to the British habit of treating macaroni as a starch for the pudding course, interchangeable with rice, sago or tapioca, and it survived in American household cookery well into the twentieth century. The single egg, not the pasta, is what turns the dish from a porridge into a custard.