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Golden Pudding
Line and ornament small pudding dish with puff pastry. Beat 2 tablespoons Crisco with 4 tablespoons sugar till creamy, add 4 tablespoons cakecrumbs, yolks 3 eggs beaten with 1/2 cup milk, 1/2 teaspoon salt, grated rind and strained juice 2 oranges. Pour into pudding dish, and bake 40 minutes. Whip up egg whites to stiff froth, stir in 3 tablespoons sugar, few drops yellow color, 1 teaspoon orange extract, and pile on top of pudding. Put back in oven to brown.
A baked orange custard in a pastry-lined dish, finished with meringue — essentially a citrus version of a queen of puddings. The original gives no oven temperature and no dish size, so both need supplying.
- Oven temperatureThe original gives none; 350F suits a custard of this kind. Return it for the meringue at the same heat for 12-15 minutes, or run it under a low broiler for 2-3 minutes if you want colour fast.
- Dish sizeA "small pudding dish" here means roughly a 1-quart baking dish or a 8-inch pie plate. The filling is shallow, which is why 40 minutes at moderate heat is enough to set it.
- CriscoThe recipe names the branded shortening; such books were issued to promote it. Two tablespoons of any solid vegetable shortening works; unsalted butter gives better flavour with orange and costs you nothing structurally.
- Cake crumbsDry, plain crumbs from a leftover sponge or pound cake, not moist fresh ones. Stale cake dried in a low oven and rubbed through a sieve gives the right texture; fine dry breadcrumbs are a workable substitute, slightly less sweet.
- OrangesOrange size varies; aim for about 1/2 cup strained juice total — much more and the custard loosens.
- Blind-baking the crustThe pastry lining goes in raw and cooks with the filling, which risks a soft base. Chilling the lined dish well and baking on a preheated sheet or a hot stone helps the bottom set.
- MeringueThree whites to three tablespoons sugar is a soft French meringue and will weep if it sits. Add the sugar gradually once the whites hold soft peaks, and spread it so it touches the pastry edge all round to anchor it.
- Yellow colouringOptional and purely cosmetic — the period liked a uniformly golden top. The zest already tints the custard; leave the dye out if you prefer.
- YieldServes four to six. Best eaten the day it is made, slightly warm or at room temperature.
This comes from a genre that flourished in the 1910s: the branded cookbook issued to teach cooks how to use a new industrial product. Crisco, a hydrogenated cottonseed-oil shortening, was launched in 1911, and Procter & Gamble commissioned recipe collections in which the fat appears in nearly every dish, sweet or savoury, from pastry to puddings. The pudding itself is far older than the shortening in it — a lined dish, a rich crumb-and-egg filling and a meringue lid is the standard Victorian and Edwardian pattern seen in queen of puddings and its many fruit variants, a thrifty way to use up stale cake and separate a few eggs to good purpose. Oranges, cheap and widely shipped by this date, supply the flavour that gives the dish its name along with its colour.