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Conservative Pudding
The weight of 3 eggs in Crisco, sugar, and flour. Beat Crisco and sugar to a cream, add flour, 1 teaspoon baking powder, and mix slowly with eggs. Add 1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract and mix all well. Ornament a Criscoed mold with raisins, pour in mixture, steam 2 hours and serve hot with milk.
A pound-cake batter in miniature, steamed rather than baked. The only tricky part is the measuring, which is done by balance rather than by cup.
- The weight of 3 eggsWeigh three eggs in the shell — usually about 6 oz total for large eggs — and use that same weight of fat, of sugar, and of flour. Roughly 3/4 cup Crisco, 3/4 cup plus 2 tablespoons sugar, and about 1 1/3 cups flour, but the scale is more reliable than the cups.
- CriscoThis book was published by Procter & Gamble to promote its new hydrogenated shortening, hence the brand name in every recipe. Modern all-vegetable shortening behaves the same way; butter works too and tastes better, though the crumb will be slightly denser.
- Creaming matters hereThere is only a teaspoon of baking powder to lift a fairly heavy batter, so most of the rise comes from air beaten into the fat and sugar. Cream them until visibly pale and fluffy, then add the eggs slowly, as instructed, or the mixture will curdle and the pudding will be close-textured.
- Ornamenting the moldGrease a 1 1/2-quart pudding basin or mold generously and press raisins against the bottom and sides in a pattern; they stay put in the fat and appear on the outside when the pudding is turned out. Fill the mold no more than two-thirds full.
- Covering and steamingThe original assumes a lidded pudding mold. Without one, cover with pleated parchment and foil tied down with string, set the mold on a rack in a deep pot, and add boiling water to come halfway up the sides. Keep it at a bare simmer and top up with boiling water as it evaporates — two hours suits a mold of this size.
- Serving"With milk" means poured over, cold or barely warmed, in the plain English nursery manner. A thin custard sauce or cream is the usual modern substitute. Unmold onto a warm dish and serve at once; it stiffens as it cools.
- YieldServes about six. Leftovers reheat by steaming for 20 minutes.
The name has nothing to do with politics as we would read it now: "Conservative pudding" appears in nineteenth-century English cookery books as a plain steamed pudding built on the weight-of-eggs formula, the same arithmetic that gives us pound cake. Measuring by the weight of the eggs is an old kind of recipe scaling: it needs no standard cup, only a balance and whatever eggs the hens have produced, and it self-adjusts to their size. What dates this version is Crisco. A Calendar of Dinners was written by Marion Harris Neil and issued by Procter & Gamble in the 1910s to persuade cooks that the new hydrogenated cottonseed shortening could replace butter and lard in everything, so an old English pudding turns up here with a trademark where the suet or butter used to be.