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For Pudding (Lbs cooked fish cupful milk)
2 lbs. cooked fish 1 cupful milk 1 tablespoonful flour 1 tablespoonful Crisco 2 eggs Salt and pepper to taste 1/4 teaspoonful onion juice 1 tablespoonful Worcestershire sauce Cream sauce
This is an ingredient list rather than a method — typical of A Calendar of Dinners, which assumed the cook already knew how a fish pudding went together. The proportions are sound; what follows fills in the gaps.
- What the method would have beenMake a white sauce from the flour, Crisco and milk, stir in the flaked fish, seasonings, onion juice and Worcestershire, then fold in the beaten eggs (whites separately if you want it light). Turn into a buttered mould or baking dish and bake until set. The original gives no time or oven heat; a moderate oven of about 350F for roughly 40 minutes is a modern equivalent, not the book's instruction.
- Two pounds of cooked fishThat is the weight after cooking and boning, not of whole fish. Any firm cooked white fish works — cod, haddock, halibut — and a dish like this would most often have been made with fish left from a previous meal. Pick it over carefully for pin bones and skin before flaking.
- CriscoThe book was published as promotional literature for Crisco, so the shortening stands in for butter or lard wherever a fat is called for. One tablespoon in a roux is doing the job of butter; use butter unless you want the neutral flavour.
- Onion juiceGrate an onion on a fine grater and press the pulp through a sieve, or grate directly onto a plate and take the liquid. A quarter teaspoon is a whisper of onion, not a seasoning you will taste on its own.
- The bindingOne tablespoon of flour to a cup of milk gives a fairly loose sauce; the two eggs are doing most of the setting. Do not add the eggs to the sauce while it is near boiling or they will curdle — let it cool to warm first.
- A water bath helpsEgg-set puddings of this kind were often baked in a mould standing in a pan of hot water, which keeps the outside from toughening before the centre sets. Test with a knife at the middle; it should come out clean.
- The cream sauceListed as an ingredient but really the accompaniment, poured over at table. A plain white sauce, sometimes with chopped parsley, hard-boiled egg or capers.
- YieldTwo pounds of fish plus eggs makes a substantial dish for six, served with the sauce and a boiled vegetable.
A Calendar of Dinners was one of the cookbooks Procter & Gamble published after introducing Crisco in 1911, built around a year of suggested menus with the new hydrogenated shortening worked in wherever a fat was needed. Fish pudding itself is much older and much travelled: a baked or steamed forcemeat of cooked fish bound with milk, eggs and a flour thickening, close kin to Scandinavian fiskepudding and to the English fish shape or mould. Its usefulness in an American household of the 1910s was economic rather than fashionable — Friday fish, or the remains of a boiled cod, stretched into a second dinner with a cupful of milk and two eggs. Worcestershire sauce was a common seasoning for poached white fish in recipes of the period.