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Chocolate Pudding with Macaroons
Put 3 cups milk to boil. Have 5 tablespoons grated chocolate in pan with 1/2 cup boiling water and 4 tablespoons sugar. When chocolate paste is smooth pour in milk. Mix 4 tablespoons cornstarch with 1 cup milk, add 1 teaspoon Crisco, and 1/4 teaspoon salt, and with this thicken boiling milk. Add 1 cup macaroon crumbs and beaten whites of 2 eggs. Pour into wet mold and set on ice 1 hour. Sweet Potatoes, Southern Style Bake sweet potatoes until thoroughly done. Remove from oven and cut in halves lengthwise; remove potato from skins carefully, so as to keep skins in condition to refill. Mash potato, adding sufficient melted Crisco and cream to moisten. The potato mixture should be of the consistency of mashed potato when put back in shells. Season with salt, pepper, and a very little sherry. Refill skins, brush tops with Crisco and brown 5 minutes in hot oven. Asparagus, Italian Style Cut tender parts of 2 bunches of asparagus into short lengths and set to boil till quite tender. Take up, drain, and put into saucepan with 3 tablespoons melted Crisco, few drops lemon juice, sprinkling of red pepper and salt. Let get thoroughly hot, take up, and serve on slices of fried bread.
Three dishes from a single day's menu: a molded chocolate blancmange, twice-baked sweet potatoes, and asparagus on fried bread. The pudding is the one with real technique in it.
- Grated chocolateThis means unsweetened baking chocolate grated on a box grater, not cocoa powder and not chips. Five tablespoons grated is roughly 1 1/2 ounces; chop and melt it with the boiling water and sugar to the same smooth paste.
- The hinge: cook the starch outOnce the cornstarch slurry goes in, the mixture must come back to a full boil and hold it a minute or two, stirring constantly. Cornstarch does not reach full thickening power or lose its raw taste below the boil, and four tablespoons in the roughly four and a half cups of liquid here is a firm unmolding set that depends on it.
- The egg whitesThe beaten whites go into the pudding while it is still near boiling, which is what the method relies on to heat them, though it will not reliably bring them to a safe temperature. Fold them in off the heat but immediately, not after the pan has cooled on the counter; use pasteurized whites if that makes you uneasy.
- CriscoIntroduced in 1911 and the reason this book exists. One teaspoon here is a tiny enrichment; butter does the same job and tastes better. In the sweet potatoes and asparagus, read it as butter or a neutral oil throughout.
- Macaroon crumbsPeriod macaroons are hard, dry almond-and-egg-white biscuits, close to Italian amaretti, not the coconut mound or the French macaron. Amaretti crushed to coarse crumbs are the right substitute; coconut macaroons will turn the pudding sweet and stringy.
- Wet mold, set on iceRinse the mold with cold water and do not dry it, which is what lets the pudding release. An hour on ice is optimistic for a mold this size; give it three to four hours in the refrigerator, or overnight, before turning out.
- Hot ovenFor browning the refilled sweet potato skins, read that as roughly 400-450F. Five minutes is enough only if the potatoes are still warm; from cold, allow longer.
- Asparagus timing"Boil till quite tender" reflects period taste. Cut lengths of asparagus need 3-4 minutes in salted water and a drain; longer and the reheat in fat leaves you with olive-colored pulp.
- YieldThe pudding serves six to eight. Two bunches of asparagus serve four to six; the recipe does not state how many sweet potatoes to bake.
A Calendar of Dinners was written by Marion Harris Neil and published by Procter & Gamble to promote Crisco, the hydrogenated cottonseed shortening the company put on the market in 1911. That accounts for the teaspoon of Crisco tucked into a chocolate pudding, where it does almost nothing: the book's job was to show the product turning up in every course of every meal, all year round, which is why the recipes are arranged as a year of complete dinner menus rather than by dish. The pudding itself is a cornstarch blancmange, the standard American molded dessert of the period, cheap and reliable in a way that egg custards were not, and the macaroon crumbs are a common trick for giving a starch pudding some texture and an almond note. Serving vegetables on fried bread, as in the asparagus, was a long-established way of stretching a dish and catching the fat and juices before they reached the plate.