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Countess Pudding
Line small Criscoed platter with Crisco pastry. Put 1 tablespoon Crisco in saucepan, add 1 cup milk, when warm pour over three tablespoons chopped cocoanut, add 1 tablespoon sugar. Allow to remain 30 minutes, add 3 yolks of eggs well beaten, and 1/2 teaspoon vanilla, pour into platter, bake 30 minutes in hot oven. Beat up whites of eggs, add pinch salt, 1 tablespoon sugar, and 1/2 teaspoon almond extract, pile on top of pudding and sprinkle with cocoanut. Brown in slow oven. Serve hot or cold.
This is a shallow coconut custard tart in a shortening crust, finished with meringue. The original's "hot oven" is the one direction to disregard: an egg-yolk custard set that fast will curdle and weep.
- Temperature, and the hingeBake the filled shell at 325-350F, not the "hot oven" (conventionally around 400-425F in period usage) until the custard is just set with a faint wobble at the centre, roughly 30-35 minutes.
- The "platter"A metal or earthenware oval pie plate or shallow ovenproof dish; the recipe specifies only a small one. Anything deeper changes the timing entirely, since the custard is meant to be thin.
- Criscoed / Crisco pastryThis book was written to sell hydrogenated vegetable shortening, so Crisco recurs throughout. Grease the dish with butter or any solid shortening and use whatever short-crust pastry you normally make; blind-bake it 10 minutes at 375F to keep the base from going soft under the custard.
- CocoanutMost likely dried shredded or desiccated coconut, though "chopped" may also indicate fresh; either way the 30-minute soak in warm milk rehydrates it and perfumes the milk. Modern sweetened flaked coconut works but makes the pudding noticeably sweeter than intended.
- How sweet it isOne tablespoon of sugar in the custard and one in the meringue is very restrained by current taste. If you want a dessert rather than an egg dish, 3-4 tablespoons in the custard and 2 tablespoons per egg white in the meringue is closer to modern expectation, and the extra sugar also stabilises the whites.
- Browning the meringue"Slow oven" corresponds to roughly 250-325F; around 300F works well. Give it 12-18 minutes, until the peaks are pale gold and dry to the touch. A hotter oven browns the surface before the interior sets and the meringue will bead and slide.
- Almond extractHalf a teaspoon in three egg whites is assertive with modern extracts. Start with a quarter teaspoon.
- YieldFour to six small servings. Custard tarts of this kind are best eaten the day they are made; refrigeration weeps the meringue.
A Calendar of Dinners belongs to a genre of cookbook that was really advertising: it was issued by the makers of Crisco after the shortening's introduction in 1911, and every recipe in it is built to demonstrate that the new hydrogenated fat could replace lard and butter in pastry, frying and cake alike. That explains the odd sight of a tablespoon of shortening warmed into the custard milk. The pudding itself is a member of the large Victorian and Edwardian family of coconut custard tarts, which spread once desiccated coconut became a cheap shelf-stable grocery in the later nineteenth century; the aristocratic name follows the period habit of dressing up a modest egg-and-milk dish with a title, alongside Queen of Puddings, Duchess Potatoes and Prince Albert Pudding.