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Rhubarb Pudding
4 tablespoonfuls Crisco 4 tablespoonfuls sugar 2 eggs 1 lemon 1/2 cupful flour 1 cupful stewed rhubarb 1/2 teaspoonful salt Few breadcrumbs Crisco a pudding dish and dust it over with breadcrumbs. Put layer of breadcrumbs at bottom, then spread in rhubarb. Beat Crisco and sugar till creamy, beat in yolks of eggs, add grated rind of lemon, sift in flour and salt. Spread this mixture over rhubarb and bake in moderate oven twenty minutes. Beat up whites of eggs to stiff froth, add one tablespoonful of sifted sugar and half teaspoonful lemon juice. Drop in spoonfuls on top of pudding and return to oven to brown lightly.
A shallow baked pudding with a thin sponge-like layer over stewed rhubarb, finished with meringue. The instructions assume you already have sweetened stewed rhubarb on hand.
- CriscoCrisco is hydrogenated vegetable shortening, still sold under that name but reformulated over the years. Unsalted butter works in the same quantity and gives better flavour in a pudding this plain.
- Tablespoonfuls, not cupsFour tablespoons of fat and four of sugar is 1/4 cup of each, a small quantity. The recipe specifies only 'a pudding dish' and gives no yield, so use a shallow dish that the mixture will cover in a thin layer.
- Moderate ovenRoughly 350-375F. Twenty minutes should set the topping; it should be dry to the touch before the meringue goes on.
- The stewed rhubarbThe recipe assumes the rhubarb is already stewed before assembly; it gives no method or sweetening for it. Wet rhubarb is the main failure point here, since excess juice soaks the crumb layer and the topping will not set, so drain it well and let it cool before assembling.
- No leaveningThere is no baking powder, so the topping relies entirely on air beaten into the fat and sugar and on the egg yolks. Cream them thoroughly and fold the flour in rather than stirring it hard.
- BreadcrumbsThe recipe says only 'few breadcrumbs'. Dry, fine crumbs hold up better than fresh soft ones; they line the greased dish and absorb juice from the rhubarb underneath the batter.
- The meringueTwo whites with a single tablespoon of sugar is a very soft meringue by modern standards and will weep if held. Return it to the oven only until lightly coloured, five to eight minutes, and serve the pudding the same day.
- Rhubarb leavesOnly the stalks are edible. Rhubarb leaves contain high levels of oxalic acid and are discarded — trim them off before stewing.
A Calendar of Dinners belongs to a genre that flourished in the 1910s: the cookbook published by a manufacturer to teach cooks to use a new product. Crisco, introduced by Procter & Gamble in 1911, was an unfamiliar thing — a solid vegetable fat offered in place of lard and butter — and the company commissioned menu books and recipe collections in which it appeared in nearly every dish, including cakes and puddings where butter had long been assumed. That is why the fat here is named as a brand and used both to grease the dish and to cream with the sugar. The pudding itself is a homely spring dish: forced rhubarb was widely available by the late nineteenth century, and stewed rhubarb under a sponge or batter layer, crowned with meringue made from the leftover whites, would seem to be a thrifty way to use both halves of the eggs in one dish.