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Raisin Puffs
Beat 2 tablespoons Crisco with 1/2 cup sugar till creamy, add 1 beaten egg, 1/4 teaspoon salt, 1/2 cup milk, 1 1/3 cups flour sifted with 2 teaspoons baking powder, 1/2 teaspoon grated nutmeg, and 1 cup chopped raisins. Crisco baking cups and fill half full with mixture and steam for 1 hour.
A small steamed pudding baked in individual cups, from one of the Procter & Gamble booklets that promoted Crisco by rewriting standard recipes around it. The method is straightforward; the only real technique is the steaming.
- The hinge: steady, gentle steamSet the filled cups on a rack in a deep pot with an inch or two of simmering water, cover the pot, and keep the water at a bare simmer for the full hour. Water at a hard boil will splash into the cups and toughen the tops; letting the pot run dry is the other failure, so check and top up with boiling water.
- Cover each cupThe recipe does not say to, but cover each cup with a square of greased foil or parchment tied or crimped on. Condensation dripping from the lid onto uncovered batter leaves a wet, gluey surface.
- CriscoCrisco is still sold, and any solid vegetable shortening works. Butter gives better flavour in the same quantity, though the crumb will be slightly less tender. Two tablespoons is a modest amount of fat for a batter this size.
- Baking cupsThese are individual metal or china cups roughly the size of a modern muffin cup or 6 oz ramekin. Grease them thoroughly; a steamed batter with this much sugar sticks.
- Half fullTake this literally. The batter rises substantially, and cups filled higher will dome over the rim and stick to the covering.
- RaisinsChopping is not optional decoration: whole raisins in a batter this loose sink to the bottom. A light dusting of the measured flour over the chopped fruit helps further.
- NutmegHalf a teaspoon of nutmeg in a batter this size is assertive by modern standards, though generous nutmeg is common in puddings of this era. Grate it fresh, as the recipe specifies.
- Yield and servingMakes about six to eight cups. Turn them out warm and serve with a lemon or vanilla sauce, or hard sauce -- steamed puddings of this kind are dry eaten plain.
A Calendar of Dinners was written by Marion Harris Neil for Procter & Gamble, which had introduced Crisco -- hydrogenated cottonseed oil sold as a substitute for lard and butter -- in 1911. The book gives a menu for every day of the year, and the recipes in it call for Crisco again and again, which is the point: the company was teaching cooks to reach for a shelf-stable vegetable fat in places where they had always used animal fat. Steamed puddings like these were a standard part of that repertoire, a legacy of the British boiled-pudding tradition adapted to individual cups and chemical leavening, and their survival in American cookery is often attributed to the fact that they needed no oven -- useful when the range was coal-fired and already busy with dinner.