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For Pudding (Can pineapple cupful sugar)
1 can pineapple 1 cupful sugar 4 tablespoonfuls melted Crisco 1 cupful breadcrumbs 1/4 teaspoonful salt 6 eggs Hard sauce
This entry is an ingredient list only — the method was assumed by the cook of 1913, who knew a bread-and-egg pudding when she saw one. Most of the work here is reconstructing what the list implies.
- No method is givenAs printed, this is a shopping list rather than a procedure. The proportions — crumbs, sugar, fat, six eggs, fruit — are those of a baked or steamed pudding, with the eggs very likely separated and the whites folded in last for lift. Anyone making it will be working from a comparable period pudding recipe for the actual handling.
- CriscoThe book was published as advertising for Crisco, then a brand-new hydrogenated vegetable shortening. Four tablespoonfuls is a quarter cup; melted butter or a neutral oil does the same job in a crumb pudding.
- One can of pineapplePeriod canned pineapple typically came in cans of around a pint to a pint and a half, sliced or grated and packed in syrup; a No. 2 can (about 20 ounces) is a reasonable assumption. That suggests roughly two cups of fruit plus its syrup; with a full cupful of added sugar on top of that, the pudding is sweet by modern standards and the sugar can reasonably be cut.
- BreadcrumbsA cupful most likely means soft crumbs from a day-old loaf rather than the dry packaged kind, which would drink far more liquid and set up dense and sandy.
- Oven and vesselThe book gives no method. A pudding of this type would usually be baked in a buttered dish set in a pan of hot water in a moderate oven until just set in the centre, or steamed in a covered mould. The water bath matters: six eggs in a shallow dish over direct heat will curdle at the edges before the middle firms.
- Hard sauceUncooked: butter creamed with powdered sugar and a flavouring — vanilla, brandy or sherry — chilled firm and served in a lump on the hot pudding so it melts. No recipe is given for it here, as it was a common enough standby.
- YieldSix eggs and a full can of fruit make a substantial pudding, probably enough for six to eight.
A Calendar of Dinners was written by Marion Harris Neil and issued by Procter & Gamble to promote Crisco, which had been introduced in 1911; the book's job was to put the new shortening into every category of cooking, puddings included, at a time when American kitchens still reached automatically for butter, lard or suet. The dish itself belongs to the long line of English bread puddings, in which stale crumbs, eggs and sugar are stretched into a dessert — here brightened with canned pineapple, which had only lately become an everyday grocery item as Hawaiian canneries scaled up in the first decades of the twentieth century. The pairing tells you a good deal about the period: an old thrift pudding built on leftover bread, dressed up with two industrial products, a tinned tropical fruit and a laboratory fat, and finished with a thoroughly Victorian hard sauce.