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Cup Puddings
These should be baked in little cups or molds. For 1 pudding, take 1 tablespoon of following ingredients: flour, Crisco, milk, currants, sugar. For 3 puddings use treble quantities. Put flour into a basin with a pinch of salt, together with currants and sugar; melt Crisco to pour in, add milk, and mix well together. Put into Criscoed cups and bake in a moderate oven for a 1/4 of an hour. Tops should be nicely browned when done. These puddings are nice either hot or cold.
A tablespoon-scaled batter pudding from one of the Crisco promotional cookbooks. The proportions are unusual enough that it pays to know what you are aiming at before you start.
- The measure is the whole recipeEverything is one tablespoon per pudding, so accuracy matters more than usual. Three puddings means three tablespoons each of flour, Crisco, milk, currants and sugar.
- Moderate ovenConventionally taken as somewhere around 350-375F. Fifteen minutes is right for cups this small; the recipe's own test is that the tops should be nicely browned.
- CriscoThe book exists to sell it, but any solid vegetable shortening works, as does melted butter, which gives more flavour. Melt it and let it cool a little before it meets the milk, or it will seize into lumps.
- CurrantsThese are dried Zante currants, not fresh redcurrants or blackcurrants. Raisins chopped small are the nearest substitute.
- Basin and Criscoed cupsA basin is simply a mixing bowl. "Criscoed cups" means well greased ramekins, dariole molds or a muffin tin; a thin film of shortening and a light dusting of flour keeps them from sticking.
- No egg and no raising agentThere is no egg here and no baking powder, so the result is dense and closer to a small baked dumpling than to a cake. A scant quarter teaspoon of baking powder per three puddings lightens them, if that is what you want.
- YieldOne pudding per tablespoon set, small individual portions. The recipe says they are good either hot or cold.
A Calendar of Dinners was written by Marion Harris Neil and issued by Procter & Gamble to promote Crisco, the hydrogenated cottonseed shortening the company launched in 1911. Books of this kind were typically distributed cheaply or at no cost, and they lean heavily on naming the product, which is why the fat here is specified by brand while the flour and sugar are not. The dish itself is older than the shortening: small individual puddings baked or steamed in cups and turned out were a fixture of British and American household cookery, a way of making a modest quantity of flour, sugar and dried fruit into something that looked like a course. The tablespoon-per-ingredient scheme is often taken as a survival of the pre-standardised kitchen, where a cook counted spoons rather than weighed, and could scale a recipe to whoever happened to be at the table.