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Cocoanut Pudding
1 cup scalded milk, 3/4 cup soft breadcrumbs, 1/2 cup grated cocoanut, 2 egg yolks, 1 tablespoon Crisco, 1/2 cup cocoa, 1/2 cup sugar, 1 teaspoon lemon juice, 2 egg whites, and 1/4 teaspoon salt.
Soak bread in scalded milk until soft. Add cocoanut, sugar, cocoa, Crisco, lemon juice and salt; beat well; add yolks eggs beaten, cut and fold in stiffly-beaten whites. Turn into Criscoed pudding dish and bake in moderate oven 30 minutes. Serve hot or cold.
A bread-and-egg pudding lightened with beaten whites, from a cookbook written to sell shortening. It works, but a few of the measures need translating and one of them needs watching.
- Moderate ovenRead this as 350F. Bake in a buttered or greased 1-quart dish for 30 minutes; the pudding should be set at the edges and just barely trembling at the centre when moved.
- CriscoAny solid vegetable shortening, or the same quantity of butter, which will taste better. "Criscoed pudding dish" simply means greased. The book was published by the makers of Crisco, hence the brand throughout its recipes.
- CocoanutUnsweetened desiccated coconut, or coconut freshly grated, is the closest substitute; sweetened flaked coconut will make the pudding noticeably sweeter, so reduce the sugar a little.
- That half cup of cocoaUnsweetened cocoa powder, sifted. It is a large proportion against 1 cup of milk and will drink up liquid and dry the pudding. Measure it lightly, or hold back a tablespoon or two if the batter looks stiff rather than loose.
- Soft breadcrumbsCrumbs torn from the interior of a day-old loaf, not dry packaged crumbs, which are denser and more absorbent by volume. Let them stand in the scalded milk off the heat until completely soft.
- Order of workCool the milk-and-crumb mixture to warm before adding the yolks, or they will scramble in streaks. Fold the whites in last with a light hand; they are the only leavening in the dish.
- The lemon juiceA teaspoon does little to the texture here; it most likely serves to sharpen the cocoa and coconut. Better not to leave it out.
- YieldFour modest servings. Good hot with cream; firmer and more cake-like cold.
A Calendar of Dinners belongs to a genre that flourished in the early twentieth century: the cookbook published by a manufacturer to teach cooks to use a new product. Crisco, a hydrogenated cottonseed shortening, was introduced by Procter & Gamble in 1911 as a substitute for lard and butter, and the recipe books that followed named it in every list, including places where a cook would once have reached for butter without thinking. The pudding itself is an older form dressed in newer ingredients: bread soaked in scalded milk, bound with eggs and baked, is a long-established English form, while the grated coconut and cocoa reflect the cheap, widely shipped tropical goods that had become ordinary in American pantries by then.