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For Sauce (Tablespoonfuls Crisco cupful)
2 tablespoonfuls Crisco 1 cupful whipped cream Powdered sugar 1/4 teaspoonful salt For pudding. Cream Crisco and sugar together, and salt, eggs well beaten, nutmeg, flour, soda mixed with buttermilk, and jam. Mix well and turn into Criscoed pudding dish and bake in moderate oven thirty minutes or until firm. For sauce. Cream Crisco and beat in as much powdered sugar as it will take up, add salt, and stir over boiling water until it becomes liquid, flavor with vanilla extract or sherry, and just before serving add cream. Serve hot with pudding.
This page has come down to us garbled: the header lists only the sauce ingredients, then the method covers both the pudding and the sauce. Anyone making it will have to supply the pudding proportions from a comparable jam pudding.
- Missing quantitiesThe pudding method calls for Crisco, sugar, salt, eggs, nutmeg, flour, soda, buttermilk and jam, but the amounts were printed on another line and are lost here. A workable baked jam pudding of this type runs roughly 1/2 cup fat, 1/2 cup sugar, 2 eggs, 2 cups flour, 1 teaspoon soda, 1 cup buttermilk and about 3/4 cup jam; treat that as a reconstruction, not the original.
- CriscoIntroduced in 1911 as an all-vegetable hydrogenated shortening, and the whole reason this book exists. Modern Crisco is reformulated to remove trans fats and behaves much the same in creaming; unsalted butter works too and tastes better, though the crumb will be slightly less tender.
- Moderate ovenThe book gives no temperature; 'moderate' is generally taken as somewhere around 350-375F. Thirty minutes suits a shallow dish; a deeper pudding basin will want longer, and the stated test "until firm" is the one to trust over the clock.
- "Criscoed" dishSimply greased with shortening. No flouring is specified, but a jam batter sticks, so flour or line the dish as well.
- Soda and buttermilkThe soda is mixed into the buttermilk rather than the flour, which starts the reaction immediately. Get the batter into the dish and into the oven promptly or the lift is spent before baking.
- The sauceThis is a creamed hard sauce melted down. "As much powdered sugar as it will take up" makes for a very sweet sauce; work the sugar in to taste rather than to a fixed figure. Warm it in a bowl over simmering water, as the recipe directs, never directly on the burner, or the sugar grains and the fat separates.
- The whipped creamThe recipe says only to add the cupful of cream just before serving. Added to a hot sauce it will thin it to a pouring consistency, which may be what was intended; folding it into a barely warm sauce keeps more body.
A Calendar of Dinners was written by Marion Harris Neil, cookery editor of the Ladies' Home Journal, and published by Procter & Gamble to promote Crisco, which had gone on sale in 1911 as the first widely marketed all-vegetable hydrogenated shortening. Recipes throughout the book substitute Crisco for butter or lard, and the verb "to Crisco" a dish recurs often enough that readers would absorb it. The dish itself is much older than the shortening: a baked buttermilk-and-soda batter enriched with jam belongs to the British steamed and baked pudding tradition, served with a sweet hard sauce that here is melted to a pouring consistency. What the page really records is a moment when a manufacturer could buy its way into the standard domestic repertoire by rewriting familiar recipes around a single new product.