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Monica Pudding
3 tablespoonfuls melted Crisco 2 cupfuls milk 1/2 cupful flour 3 eggs 1/4 cupful sugar 1/4 teaspoonful salt 1/2 teaspoonful vanilla extract
For Sauce (Cupful Crisco cupful powdered)
1/4 cupful Crisco 1/2 cupful powdered sugar 1/2 cupful cream 1/2 teaspoonful vanilla extract For pudding. Heat 1 cupful milk. Add other cupful milk gradually to flour, then stir into boiling milk, stir and cook five minutes. The mixture should be quite smooth. Remove from fire, add Crisco, sugar, yolks of eggs well beaten, salt, vanilla, and whites of eggs stiffly beaten. Turn into Criscoed baking dish, set in pan half full of boiling water. Bake in moderate oven thirty-five minutes. Serve with sauce.
For sauce. Melt Crisco, add sugar, cream and vanilla extract and bring to boil.
The book gives quantities only — no method, no pan, no oven setting. The proportions identify it clearly enough: this is a thin baked batter pudding, closer to a custard than a cake, and everything below follows from that ratio.
- The missing methodWhisk the flour, sugar and salt with the eggs to a smooth paste, then thin gradually with the milk, stir in the melted shortening and the vanilla, and pour into a greased dish of about 1 1/2 quarts. The book gives no oven setting; around 350F for 45 to 55 minutes, until the centre is just set with a slight wobble, suits these proportions.
- Do not overbakeWith 2 cupfuls of milk to 3 eggs and only half a cupful of flour, this is a custard held together by a little starch. Past the point where the centre stops trembling it curdles and weeps liquid, and no amount of standing will bring it back.
- Melted CriscoCrisco is hydrogenated vegetable shortening, still sold, though the modern formula is not the cottonseed product of the 1910s. Melted butter or a neutral oil behaves the same here. Warm the milk slightly before adding the fat, or the shortening will set into hard flecks on contact with cold liquid.
- Expect layersA batter this loose may separate as it bakes, the flour and fat settling into a thin pale base while the top sets custardy, an effect later cookbooks sold as "impossible" pie. It is not a fault.
- Sweetness and servingA quarter cupful of sugar for close to a quart of batter is barely sweet by present taste, and it would take well under a sauce — a hard sauce, a thin custard, or warmed jam. Serve it warm from the dish.
- YieldFour to six servings as a plain family pudding.
- Tablespoonful and cupfulTreat these as the modern tablespoon and 8-oz cup, measured level.
"A Calendar of Dinners" was one of the cookbooks Procter & Gamble issued in the 1910s to teach American cooks what to do with Crisco, the hydrogenated vegetable shortening the company had launched a few years earlier as a substitute for lard and butter. That commercial purpose explains the phrasing of the ingredient list: the shortening comes first, by name, in a pudding where three tablespoonfuls of fat are the least consequential thing in the bowl. The dish itself belongs to the long English line of baked batter puddings, stretched here with enough milk to set as a custard. The name appears to be decorative rather than descriptive: no origin for it is documented.