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Walnut Pudding
1/2 cupful sugar 2 cupfuls flour 2 teaspoonfuls baking powder 4 tablespoonfuls melted Crisco 1/2 teaspoonful salt 2 eggs 1 cupful milk 1 teaspoonful vanilla extract 1 cupful chopped English walnut meats
For Sauce (Cupful sugar cupful water)
1 cupful sugar 1/2 cupful water 3 yolks eggs 2 cupfuls whipped cream 1/2 teaspoonful lemon extract Mix flour, sugar, salt and baking powder together, add eggs well beaten, vanilla extract, milk, Crisco, and nuts. Mix well and divide into 9 greased individual molds, cover with greased papers, and steam steadily for three-quarters of an hour. Turn out and serve.
For sauce. Boil sugar and water till syrup spins a thread, pour over beaten yolks of eggs, and stir quickly. Set aside to cool, stir occasionally, add lemon extract and just before serving mix in whipped cream. Sufficient for nine individual puddings.
Woodford Pudding (Kate B. Vaughn) 1 cupful sugar 3 eggs 1/2 cupful buttermilk 1 teaspoonful baking soda 1 1/2 cupfuls flour 1/2 cupful Crisco 1 cupful blackberry jam 1/2 teaspoonful salt 1/2 teaspoonful grated nutmeg
This is an ingredient list rather than a set of instructions — A Calendar of Dinners assumed its reader knew how a plain pudding batter went together. The proportions are those of a simple butter-cake batter, so treat it as one.
- The missing methodCream the sugar with the melted shortening, beat in the eggs, then add the sifted flour, baking powder and salt alternately with the milk, and fold the walnuts and vanilla in last. Folding the nuts in at the end avoids the extra beating that, once the flour is in, gives a tough, tunnelled crumb.
- Baked or steamedWith 2 teaspoonfuls of baking powder and no steaming time implied, this most likely a baked pudding, though the book does not say. As a guide, an 8-inch square or a 2-quart dish at around 350F for 40 to 50 minutes, until a skewer comes out clean. Steamed in a covered mould it would take considerably longer — in the region of 1 1/2 to 2 hours — and come out denser and moister.
- CriscoThe book was published to promote Crisco, then a new hydrogenated cottonseed shortening. Modern Crisco is a different formulation but works; 4 tablespoonfuls of melted butter or a neutral oil substitutes directly, butter giving noticeably more flavour.
- CupfulsA cupful here is the US 8-fluid-ounce cup. Two cupfuls of flour is roughly 240 to 250 g if spooned into the cup and levelled; scooping the cup through the flour packs in more, and the pudding will be dry.
- English walnutsSimply the common walnut, named to distinguish it from the American black walnut, which is stronger and more resinous. Black walnuts will work but will dominate the vanilla. Toasting the nuts for 8 minutes at 350F before chopping improves them considerably.
- Yield and servingServes six to eight. Puddings of this type were sent to table warm with a pouring sauce — a thin vanilla custard, a lemon sauce, or hard sauce — and it is noticeably plain without one.
A Calendar of Dinners belongs to a genre of the early twentieth century: the cookbook issued by a manufacturer to teach cooks how to use a new product. Crisco appeared on the American market in 1911, and hydrogenated vegetable shortening had to be argued for against lard and butter, so the recipes that carried its name were deliberately ordinary — the sort of thing a household already made, rewritten with Crisco in the fat column. A plain nut pudding of this kind, baked in a dish and served warm with sauce, was standard weekday dessert territory; the walnuts and vanilla were the whole of its luxury. The word "pudding" in such books covers almost any sweet baked or steamed batter, not the soft custard the word now suggests in American usage.