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For Sauce (Tablespoonfuls sugar)
4 tablespoonfuls sugar 1/2 teaspoonful salt 1/2 cupful Crisco 2 tablespoonfuls sherry 4 tablespoonfuls blanched and chopped almonds For pudding. Beat eggs, add crumbs, salt, Crisco, sugar, and pineapple cut into small dice. Turn into Criscoed pudding dish and bake in moderate oven until firm. Serve hot or cold with sauce.
For sauce. Beat Crisco with sugar to a cream, add salt, sherry, and almonds. Mrs. Vaughn's Plum Pudding 1/2 lb. brown sugar 3 eggs 1/4 lb. breadcrumbs 1/2 lb. browned flour 1/2 lb. Crisco 2 teaspoonfuls baking powder 1 teaspoonful salt 1/2 teaspoonful powdered cloves 1/2 teaspoonful powdered cinnamon 1 teaspoonful powdered ginger 1/2 teaspoonful grated nutmeg 1/4 teaspoonful powdered mace 1/2 cupful New Orleans molasses 1/2 cupful brandy (or grape juice) 1/4 cupful lemon juice 1/2 lb. seeded raisins 1/2 lb. sultana raisins 1 lb. currants 1 lb. crystallized fruits, consisting of pineapple, cherries, figs, orange peel, and citron Chop crystallized fruits, add raisins and currants, then pour brandy (or grape juice) over them and let stand several hours. Cream Crisco and sugar, add eggs well beaten together, and all other ingredients. Divide into greased mold (small Crisco cans will do) filling two-thirds full and steam steadily for three hours. Turn out while hot and serve with hard sauce. Sufficient for two medium-sized puddings or one very large one.
Two recipes have run together here: the tail of a pineapple crumb pudding with its almond-sherry sauce, and Mrs. Vaughn's steamed plum pudding. The pudding-proper ingredient list for the first is missing from this page, so treat the plum pudding as the workable recipe.
- The hinge: steam, do not bakeThe plum pudding must steam in a covered mold set on a rack above simmering water for the full three hours, with the water topped up as it drops. Filling the mold only two-thirds full is not optional; the batter climbs as the baking powder and the trapped steam work.
- CriscoCrisco is hydrogenated vegetable shortening, still sold and interchangeable weight for weight with modern shortening. Butter gives a better flavour in both the pudding and the sauce, though the pudding will be slightly denser. Old books reckon a cup of fat to the half-pound; by modern weights a cup of shortening is closer to 7 oz, so 1/2 lb is about a cup plus a spoonful and 1/2 cupful about 3 1/2 to 4 oz.
- Browned flourHalf a pound of flour stirred in a dry heavy pan over medium heat until it is the colour of light brown sugar, then cooled and weighed. It adds a toasted note and, because browning weakens the gluten, keeps the pudding tender. Do not skip the cooling, or it will melt the creamed fat.
- Do not use the cans"Small Crisco cans" were seamed tin-plate cans meant to be reused. Modern cans have interior linings and coatings not intended for prolonged heating. Use pudding basins, coffee tins sold as bakeware, or straight-sided heatproof bowls, each covered with greased parchment and foil and tied.
- Moderate ovenFor the first pudding, "moderate" in this period is usually reckoned at about 350-375F. Baked custard-crumb puddings of this type are firm when a knife inserted off-centre comes out clean, likely somewhere around 45 minutes to an hour in a 1 1/2-quart dish.
- Currants and sultanasCurrants here are dried Zante currants, not fresh redcurrants. Sultanas are golden raisins. A pound of currants plus a pound of candied fruit plus a pound of raisins is a great deal of fruit for the batter, which is correct for the style: the cake is mortar holding the fruit together.
- The sauceThe almond-sherry sauce is a hard sauce, creamed and served cold in spoonfuls onto the hot pudding so it melts. It will not thicken with heat, so do not cook it. Grape juice substitutes for the brandy in the pudding, as the original allows, but hard sauce made with wine wants the wine.
- Yield and keepingTwo medium puddings; portions depend on how thickly you cut, but eight to ten each is a fair estimate. Steamed puddings of this richness keep well wrapped and chilled, and are reheated by steaming for 45 minutes to an hour.
This comes from one of the Procter & Gamble cookbooks issued to persuade American cooks to replace butter, lard and suet with Crisco, the hydrogenated cottonseed shortening the company launched in 1911; the recipes are generally attributed to Marion Harris Neil, and the brand name appears in nearly every line, even as a verb ("Criscoed pudding dish"). Plum pudding was a shrewd target for that campaign, since the traditional English version depends on shredded beef suet, and a vegetable fat that behaved like suet was the whole selling point. The recipe is otherwise conservative: brown sugar, molasses, a pound each of currants and candied fruit, the standard spices of cloves, cinnamon, ginger, mace and nutmeg, and a long steaming rather than baking. The alternative of grape juice for brandy is a period tell, offered in the years when temperance sentiment was strong and national Prohibition only a few years off.