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Orange Puffs
Beat 1/2 cup Crisco with 2/3 cup sugar, add 2 well-beaten eggs, 3/4 cup milk, 2 cups flour, 1/2 teaspoon salt, 2 teaspoons baking powder, and 1 teaspoon orange extract. Bake in Criscoed and floured gem pans and serve hot with orange sauce.
For sauce. Mix 1/2 cup sugar with 2 tablespoons cornstarch, and 1/4 teaspoon salt. Add 1 cup boiling water and boil eight minutes, add grated rinds and strained juice 2 oranges and 3 tablespoons Crisco.
A plain muffin batter dressed up with orange extract, from one of the Crisco company's promotional cookbooks. The original gives no oven temperature and no time, so those are the first things to supply.
- Gem pansA gem pan is a heavy cast-iron muffin pan with rounded cups. A standard 12-cup muffin tin works; the batter fills about ten to twelve cups two-thirds full.
- Oven and timeThe original gives neither. Bake at 400F for 18 to 22 minutes, until a tester comes out clean and the tops spring back.
- CriscoCrisco is the point of the book, not the recipe. Any solid vegetable shortening behaves much the same way; softened butter gives better flavour and a slightly denser crumb. Modern Crisco has been reformulated to cut trans fat and may not behave exactly like the 1910s product; use it cool rather than warm.
- "Criscoed and floured"Grease and flour the cups, or use paper liners. This batter has enough fat to release cleanly either way.
- MixingCream the fat and sugar, beat in the eggs, then add the flour mixture and milk alternately and stop as soon as the flour disappears. Overworked muffin batter makes tunnels and tough peaks.
- Orange extractOne teaspoon of extract is a lot by current standards. Half a teaspoon plus the grated zest of one orange gives a fresher result.
- The sauceLong boiling of cornstarch is common in period recipes and would help cook out the raw starch taste; two to three minutes at a bare boil is enough with modern cornstarch, and prolonged boiling can thin the sauce as the starch breaks down. Add the juice and zest off the heat, since acid weakens cornstarch, and whisk in the fat last for gloss.
- YieldTen to twelve puffs, and roughly two cups of sauce. Serve them hot; they are best eaten fresh.
A Calendar of Dinners was written by Marion Harris Neil for Procter & Gamble, which introduced Crisco in 1911 and needed to teach American cooks what to do with a vegetable shortening that behaved like lard but came from cottonseed. The book's recipes call for it throughout, often in places where butter would have been used before, and it uses "Criscoed" as a verb for greasing a pan. The dish itself is not an old form: "puffs" baked in gem pans were simply sweetened muffins, and gem pans had been sold since the mid-nineteenth century, making small individual quick breads a familiar part of the American breakfast table before Crisco existed.