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Raisin Batter Pudding
Beat up 3 eggs, sift in 2 cups flour and 1/4 teaspoon salt, add 1 tablespoon Crisco, 1 cup cream, and beat for 8 minutes; then add 1 teaspoon baking powder and 1 teaspoon orange extract. Pour into a Criscoed casserole, sprinkle over 8 tablespoons sultana raisins, and bake in moderate oven 1 hour. Serve with maple syrup.
Cream of Corn, a la Creole Put 1 can of corn through meat chopper, add 1 large onion, sliced, 1 sprig of parsley, and 1 pint of water.
Cook altogether 20 minutes, being careful not to let it scorch, then press through a fine sieve, extracting all pulp possible. Melt 2 tablespoons Crisco, add an equal amount of sifted flour, 1/2 teaspoon salt, and dash of pepper. Cook to smooth paste; then add, very gradually, 1 quart scalded milk. When thick and smooth, add corn pulp and juice and 1 tablespoon sugar. Add salt to taste, and just before serving add 1 cup scalded cream or very rich milk.
Two recipes have run together in the original setting: a baked batter pudding with raisins, and a corn soup. Both come from a Crisco-sponsored book, so shortening appears where an earlier cook would have used butter.
- Moderate ovenA moderate oven of the period is roughly 350-375F; the book itself gives no temperature. At an hour the pudding should be puffed, browned at the edges, and dry to a skewer in the middle.
- CasseroleAt this period the word means any deep ovenproof baking dish, not the covered stoneware pot the word suggests now. A 2-quart baking dish or a 9-inch square pan works; "Criscoed" simply means greased.
- CriscoOne tablespoon of shortening in the batter can be replaced with melted butter or a neutral oil with no loss. Crisco was new in 1911 and this book exists partly to sell it, which is why it turns up in every line.
- Beating for 8 minutesThat figure assumes a hand whisk or spoon; a stand mixer will reach the same point in considerably less time.
- Baking powder lastIt goes in at the end, after the long beating, so the gas is not exhausted before the pudding reaches the oven. Get the dish into the heat promptly once it is in.
- Sultana raisinsSultanas are seedless golden raisins; ordinary golden or dark raisins substitute directly. Eight tablespoons is half a cup. Sprinkled on top they will sink partway, and the exposed ones darken.
- Yield and servingThe pudding serves six as written, warm from the dish with maple syrup poured over. It falls as it cools, so serve it soon after it comes out.
- Meat chopper, for the corn soupThe hand-cranked chopper mashed and shredded the kernels. A food processor or blender, pulsed briefly, does the same job; you are only breaking the kernels open before simmering, since everything goes through a sieve afterward.
- Corn soup quantitiesA can of corn today is roughly 15 oz, though period cans were commonly larger. With a quart of scalded milk plus a cup of cream this makes about six servings and is thin by modern standards; reducing the milk by a cup gives more body.
This comes from a Crisco-sponsored cookbook of the mid-1910s, one of a wave of recipe collections published to teach American cooks what to do with the new hydrogenated vegetable shortening, which had gone on sale in 1911. Baked batter puddings themselves are much older and much plainer: an English tradition of eggs, flour and milk beaten hard and set in the oven, of which Yorkshire pudding is the savory branch and this raisin version the sweet one. The orange extract and maple syrup are the American touches. The corn soup that follows it wears the same period label, "a la Creole."