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Macaroon Pudding
Soak 6 macaroons in 1/2 cup milk. Heat 2 cups milk in double boiler, add 2 tablespoons cornstarch moistened with 1 well beaten egg, 1 teaspoon Crisco, 1/2 teaspoon salt, and macaroons. Cook for 20 minutes, remove from fire, add 1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract. Turn into Criscoed and sugared pudding dish, sprinkle 1/2 cup sugar on top, and cover with sliced peaches. Serve cold.
A cornstarch-thickened milk pudding stretched with crumbled macaroons, from a cookbook written to sell shortening. Two things need attention: the macaroons meant here, and the fact that the pudding base carries no sugar at all.
- Which macaroonsIn 1915 a macaroon usually meant an almond cookie: crisp, egg-white and ground-almond, close to today's amaretti or Italian almond macaroons. Coconut macaroons existed by this date too, but the almond sort is the likelier intent here; French macaron sandwich cookies are not in question. Six of them is perhaps 2 oz; crumble before soaking.
- The sugar is all on topThe base is unsweetened apart from whatever sugar the cookies contribute, and the 1/2 cup sprinkled over the surface does the work. If you want an evenly sweet pudding, put 3 to 4 tablespoons of sugar into the milk and reduce the topping accordingly.
- CriscoThe teaspoon of shortening in the custard, and the greased dish, are the book's reason for existing -- it was published by the makers of Crisco. Butter does the same job and tastes better; a teaspoon in a milk pudding is a richness adjustment, nothing structural.
- Temper the egg and starchTwo tablespoons cornstarch will not dissolve in one beaten egg alone. Whisk the starch smooth with a few tablespoons of the cold milk first, then beat in the egg, then thin the mixture with a ladle of hot milk before it goes back into the pan or the egg will set in threads.
- Twenty minutes over waterThat is the double boiler timing, and it is not excessive -- gentle indirect heat needs the time to gelatinize the starch fully and cook out any raw-starch taste. Stir often. Over direct heat the same pudding thickens in about 3 minutes and scorches on the bottom.
- PeachesFresh ripe peaches, peeled and sliced. The recipe lays them on as soon as the pudding is turned into the dish; on a hot surface they weep and the sugar layer dissolves into syrup, so it is worth waiting until the pudding has cooled and set. Drained canned slices work out of season.
- YieldAbout 3 cups of pudding, four servings in a shallow dish. Chill at least 3 hours; it is meant to be firm enough to spoon out in sections.
A Calendar of Dinners was written by Marion Harris Neil for Procter & Gamble to promote Crisco, the hydrogenated vegetable shortening introduced in 1911, and the teaspoon of it dropped into a milk pudding here shows how hard the book worked to put the product into every dish, whether or not it belonged. The pudding itself is an older idea: a cornstarch blancmange, the plain nursery and boarding-house dessert of the nineteenth century, dressed up by soaking almond macaroons into the milk. Using up hardened cookies this way is standard thrift cookery -- the same logic as bread pudding or a trifle base -- and almond macaroons, being dry and long-keeping, were exactly the kind of thing a household had sitting in a tin.