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Cranberry Pudding
Cream 1/2 cup Crisco with 1 cup sugar, add 3 eggs well beaten, 1/2 cup milk, 3 1/2 cups flour, 2 teaspoons baking powder, 1/2 teaspoon salt, and 1/2 teaspoon almond extract, then stir in 1 1/2 cups cranberries, turn into Criscoed mold, cover with greased paper and steam 4 hours. Serve with milk.
A steamed suet-style pudding with the suet swapped for shortening, from a cookbook written to sell Crisco. It works, but the proportions and the four-hour steam both need a second look.
- The batter is very stiffThree and a half cups of flour against half a cup of milk and three eggs gives a dough closer to a drop biscuit than a pudding batter. It may need another 1/4 to 1/2 cup of milk to reach a thick, spoonable consistency that will fill the mold's corners.
- CriscoStill sold, and the recipe was written to promote it; any solid vegetable shortening behaves the same. Butter gives better flavour but a slightly heavier crumb. "Criscoed mold" simply means well greased.
- The mold and its coverThe batter comes to roughly 1 1/2 to 2 quarts before it rises, so choose a pudding basin or tube mold large enough to leave it no more than two-thirds full. The greased paper is tied down to keep condensation out; a sheet of parchment with a pleat folded across the middle, then foil and string, is the modern equivalent and allows for rise.
- Setting up the steamStand the mold on a rack or folded cloth in a deep pot, add boiling water to come halfway up the sides, and keep it at a bare simmer. Top up with boiling water as it evaporates — a pot that boils dry over four hours will crack the mold and scorch the pudding.
- Four hours is longThat timing belongs to dense suet puddings. A baking-powder pudding may well be done sooner; start testing with a skewer at around two hours and stop when it comes out clean.
- CranberriesWhole raw berries, stirred in at the end so they stay intact and burst during steaming. Fresh or frozen both work; frozen should go in unthawed to keep them from bleeding into the batter.
- Almond extractHalf a teaspoon in this quantity is assertive; a scant half teaspoon is safer if you want the cranberries to lead.
- Serving"Serve with milk" means poured over, plainly, as a supper pudding. A hard sauce or a warm vanilla sauce suits it better to most tastes now. Unmold while hot; serves 8 to 10.
A Calendar of Dinners is one of the great advertising cookbooks — a menu-a-day collection built around Crisco, the hydrogenated cottonseed shortening Procter & Gamble launched in 1911, and its recipes are written to demonstrate that the new fat could stand in for butter and lard anywhere they had traditionally been used. A steamed pudding was a pointed choice: the genre depended on suet, and replacing suet with a shelf-stable vegetable fat was exactly the argument the book existed to make. Cranberries, meanwhile, were one of the few fruits an American household could reliably get through late autumn and winter, sold loose by the quart from the Cape Cod and New Jersey bogs, and they turn up steamed, baked and stewed all through period cookery.