Home › A Calendar of Dinners › Farina Pudding
Farina Pudding
Stir into 3 cups boiling milk 1 cup farina, and cook 10 minutes. Rub together 1 tablespoon Crisco and 2 tablespoons sugar; add yolks of 3 eggs, grated rind of 1 lemon and 25 chopped blanched almonds. Stir this mixture into farina after it is little cooled; lastly add whites of 3 eggs beaten to stiff froth. Steam this pudding in covered mold for 1 1/2 hours. Serve with any sweet pudding sauce.
A steamed semolina pudding from a Crisco-sponsored cookbook, thick enough to slice. The one thing to get right is the steaming setup: the mold must be covered and the water must never come off a steady low boil for the full 90 minutes.
- FarinaFarina is milled wheat middlings — sold today as Cream of Wheat or as fine semolina. Use the quick-cooking or regular kind, not instant, and not coarse semolina meant for pasta.
- CriscoThe book was written to promote Crisco, then a novelty. One tablespoon of any neutral solid shortening works, and unsalted butter is better here since the pudding is a dessert.
- The ratio is deliberateOne cup of farina to three cups of milk cooks down to a stiff paste, not a porridge. Stir constantly over low heat for the full 10 minutes or the bottom will scorch, and expect to work at it near the end.
- Cool before the yolks"After it is little cooled" means let it drop to warm rather than hot. Yolks stirred into near-boiling farina will scramble in threads and you will feel them on the tongue.
- Steaming the moldGrease a 1 1/2 to 2 quart mold or pudding basin, fill it no more than two-thirds, and cover tightly with the lid or with foil tied down. Set it on a rack in a deep pot with boiling water reaching halfway up, cover the pot, and top up with boiling water as it evaporates.
- AlmondsTwenty-five blanched almonds is about 1 ounce, a scant 1/4 cup once chopped. Chop them fine; large pieces sink through the batter as it sets.
- FoldingFold the beaten whites in in two additions with a spatula. The farina base is heavy and overworking it will collapse the froth, leaving a dense, rubbery pudding.
- Yield and sauceServes six. Let it stand 10 minutes before unmolding. A lemon or vanilla pudding sauce, or a thin custard, suits the lemon rind in the batter.
This comes from a period when steamed puddings were still everyday desserts and the double boiler or steamer was standard equipment — a mold set over water needed no oven and no watching, which mattered in a coal-range kitchen. Farina puddings belong to a broad European family of milk-and-grain sweets, close cousins to semolina pudding; the sweetened yolk paste, lemon rind and chopped almonds are the standard flavourings of that tradition. The Crisco is the tell that dates the book: the shortening's introduction is generally traced to the early 1910s, and its makers published cookbooks in which it replaced butter and lard in every recipe, dessert puddings included, as part of the campaign to establish a wholly new fat in the American pantry.