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Swiss Pudding
1 1/2 cups bread-crumbs, 1 pound apples, 4 tablespoons brown sugar, 2 tablespoons Crisco, and grated lemon rind. Choose good cooking apples, peel, core, and thinly slice them. Well Crisco a pint pudding-dish, place some crumbs on bottom, and press some against the sides of dish, put in layer of apples, some sugar, a little lemon peel or any other flavoring preferred, then a few more crumbs, and repeat this until all are used; leaving crumbs for top layer.
Pile mixture up little as it shrinks while cooking. Place Crisco in small pieces on top. Bake in moderately hot oven until apples are quite cooked and pudding is browned top and bottom. Turn pudding out on to flat dish, sprinkle sugar over top. Serve with boiled custard or cream. This pudding may be served hot or cold.
An apple-and-breadcrumb pudding of the brown betty family, written for the newly launched Crisco. Nothing here is difficult, but two details decide whether it turns out of the dish in one piece.
- The hinge: line the dish properlyThe crumb shell is the structure. Grease the dish generously, then press crumbs firmly onto the base and up the sides so no bare metal or china shows, and finish with a solid crumb lid. A thin or patchy lining is why these puddings collapse when inverted.
- "Moderately hot oven"375-400F. Figure 40 to 50 minutes for a pound of thinly sliced apples; test with a skewer through the centre and give it longer if the fruit still resists.
- CriscoHydrogenated vegetable shortening, still sold, though reformulated to remove trans fats. Butter gives a better flavour here and behaves the same way in the same quantity.
- Bread-crumbsThe recipe does not specify a type; soft crumbs from day-old bread work best here rather than fine dried crumbs or panko. Rub the bread through your fingers or pulse it briefly; commercial dry crumbs tend to absorb apple juice and go pasty.
- "A pint pudding-dish"A pint dish is 2 cups, which will be hard pressed to hold a pound of apples and a cup and a half of crumbs; the recipe has you pile the mixture up, on the grounds that it shrinks while cooking. Use a 1-quart dish if you would rather not build a dome, and expect visible shrinkage either way.
- Apples"Good cooking apples" means a variety that softens without collapsing: Granny Smith, Northern Spy. Bramley cooks to a puree, which is fine for flavour but will not give you distinct layers. Slice thin, no more than 1/8 inch, or the crumbs brown before the fruit cooks through.
- Boiled custardA stirred egg custard sauce, what would now be called crème anglaise, not a baked or set custard. Cold heavy cream, plain or lightly whipped, is the easier option.
- YieldFour modest servings. It cuts more neatly cold, and the crumb crust stays crisper if you turn it out while still warm rather than letting it steam in the dish.
A Calendar of Dinners belongs to a genre of cookbook written to sell a single product: Crisco reached the market in 1911, and Procter & Gamble commissioned recipe collections in which the new shortening replaced butter, lard and suet in everything, puddings included. The dish itself is older than the fat it is cooked in — an apple pudding built in layers with buttered breadcrumbs, close kin to apple charlotte and to the American brown betty, and puddings under the name "Swiss pudding" turn up in British household cookbooks of the nineteenth century. What Switzerland has to do with it is unclear; the name is generally treated as a Victorian flourish rather than a documented origin, in the same vein as Swiss roll.