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Fruit Snowballs
Cream 1/4 cup Crisco with 1/2 cup sugar, add 1/4 cup milk, 1 cup flour, 1 teaspoon baking powder, and 3 stiffly beaten egg whites. Mix and divide into small Criscoed molds, cover with Criscoed papers, and steam 35 minutes. Turn out, sprinkle with powdered sugar, garnish with candied cherries and pineapple and serve with custard sauce made with egg yolks.
A steamed sponge pudding from the era when Crisco was the sponsor as much as the shortening. It is straightforward, but the molds and the steaming need a little translation.
- CriscoAny solid vegetable shortening works, and the recipe reads as one written to sell it; Crisco recipe collections of this period were promotional publications. Butter gives better flavour at the same weight, though the crumb will be slightly less tender.
- "Criscoed" molds and papersGrease the molds thoroughly, and cut rounds of parchment or greaseproof paper, greased on the underside, to sit directly on each pudding. Foil over the top, crimped at the rim, keeps condensation out.
- MoldsSmall dariole molds, timbale molds or a standard muffin tin of individual custard cups all suit. This batter makes roughly six to eight small puddings; fill each about two-thirds full so they have room to dome into the ball shape the name promises.
- Steaming setupSet the molds on a rack in a deep pan with boiling water reaching halfway up their sides, cover, and keep the water at a steady bare boil. Top up with boiling water if it drops; the 35 minutes assumes the pan never goes off the boil.
- Folding the whitesThe whites carry most of the lift alongside the baking powder; there are no whole eggs in the batter. Fold them in in two additions with a light hand rather than beating them through.
- Custard sauceThe yolks left over from the whites make it: the three yolks whisked with a third of a cup of sugar, stirred into two cups of scalded milk, and cooked over low heat until it coats a spoon, around 175–180°F. It risks curdling above about 185°F.
- ServingTurn out while warm; they sink and toughen if left to cool in the molds. Dust with powdered sugar just before they go to the table, as it dissolves on a warm surface.
This comes from a promotional cookbook of the 1910s, when Procter & Gamble were pushing Crisco — introduced in 1911 — as a replacement for lard and butter in every kind of cooking, and commissioned professional cookery writers to produce recipe and menu books in which the product appears in nearly every line. The dish itself is older than the shortening: small steamed puddings turned out and dressed in white were sold under "snowball" names in nineteenth-century English and American cookery, though the name was attached to several quite different sweets. The recipe's tidy economy — whites in the pudding, yolks in the sauce — is exactly the sort of thing household writers of the period prized.