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Rice Pudding
1/2 cupful rice 3 cupfuls milk 3/4 cupful sugar 1/4 cupful Crisco 3 eggs Powdered cinnamon to taste 1/4 cupful seeded raisins 1/2 teaspoonful salt Wash rice and steam it in milk until thick, then allow to cool. Cream Crisco and sugar, add well beaten eggs, raisins, salt, rice, and cinnamon. Grease pudding dish with Crisco, pour in mixture and bake one hour in moderate oven.
A baked custard-and-rice pudding from one of Procter & Gamble's Crisco promotional cookbooks, where the shortening turns up in places butter would normally sit. The method is unusual in that the rice is fully cooked before it ever meets the eggs.
- Moderate ovenBake at 350F. An hour at that temperature will set the custard through; the top should be just barely trembling at the centre when you pull it.
- CriscoThe 1/4 cupful of shortening is here because the book exists to sell it. Butter is the natural substitute and improves the flavour; the pudding will not suffer for the swap.
- "Steam it in milk until thick"This means cooking the rice gently in the milk, ideally over a double boiler or on the lowest heat with frequent stirring, until the grains are soft and the mixture is thick and creamy. Direct high heat will scorch the milk and the sugar-laden custard will taste of it afterwards.
- Cool before adding eggsThe instruction to let the rice cool is the hinge of the recipe. Beaten eggs stirred into hot rice will scramble in streaks, and the pudding bakes up curdled rather than smooth.
- Rice typeShort or medium grain gives the creamy body this pudding wants. Long grain works but stays distinctly grainy, and parboiled or converted rice keeps its grains firm and separate rather than softening into the custard.
- MilkWhole milk. Skim milk gives a thin, watery set at these proportions, since there is no cream and only three eggs to carry three cupfuls of liquid.
- Water bathNot called for, but setting the dish in a pan of hot water gives a gentler, more even custard and protects the edges from setting into rubber before the centre is done.
- YieldAbout 5 cupfuls, or a generous quart, serving six. Use a 2-quart dish so the mixture has room and does not weep over the rim.
A Calendar of Dinners belongs to a genre that flourished in the 1910s and 1920s: the cookbook published by a manufacturer to teach cooks what to do with a new product. Crisco, the hydrogenated vegetable shortening introduced by Procter & Gamble in 1911, was unfamiliar to households that had cooked with butter, lard and suet, so the company commissioned recipe collections in which Crisco appears in nearly every dish, sometimes plausibly and sometimes, as in a baked custard, with a certain determination. The pudding underneath the branding is far older: rice boiled in milk and sweetened has been an English household dessert since at least the seventeenth century, when rice was an expensive import used chiefly in sweet dishes, and the addition of eggs turns it from a porridge into a baked custard. Cinnamon and raisins are the standard companions, and remain so.