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April 23
Menu: Vegetarian; Julienne Soup; Creamed Salsify Patties; Mushrooms in Casserole; Mashed Potatoes Green String Beans; Orange Fritters *Swiss Pudding; Coffee Swiss Pudding-11/2 cups breadcrumbs, 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. oven Pile mixture up little as it shrinks while cooking. Place Crisco in small pieces on top. Bake in moderately hot 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.
A crumb-and-apple pudding of the brown-betty family, built in a small dish and turned out to serve. The text as printed has a few words out of order ("oven Pile mixture up little" belongs with "Bake in moderately hot"), but the method is clear enough.
- Oven temperature"Moderately hot" in cookbooks of this period is usually taken as somewhere around 375-400F, though the term was never precise. Expect roughly 45 minutes to an hour for the apples to collapse fully and the crumbs to colour on top and bottom.
- The pint pudding-dishA pint is 2 cups, so this is a genuinely small pudding — a 3- to 4-inch deep bowl or a single-serving-plus baking dish. Doubling everything into a 1-quart dish works, but lengthen the bake.
- CriscoOrdinary vegetable shortening. The book exists to sell it; butter gives a better flavour here and behaves the same way, both for greasing the dish and for dotting the top.
- BreadcrumbsUse dry crumbs, not soft fresh ones. Soft crumbs turn to paste against the wet apples and the pudding will not hold its shape when turned out.
- Grease and crumb the dish thoroughlyThis is the hinge. The pudding is unmoulded, so the greased sides must be lined with a solid coat of crumbs and the crumb top layer pressed down firmly, or the whole thing slumps onto the plate.
- ApplesOne pound is about three medium apples. A firm cooking variety that breaks down without going watery — Bramley or Granny Smith — is presumably what "good cooking apples" means.
- Piling it upMound the mixture above the rim of the dish. Raw apple shrinks appreciably in the oven, as the recipe itself notes, and a level fill bakes down to a hollow pudding.
- Yield and servingThe pint dish serves two, generously three, with boiled custard or pouring cream. It is firmer and easier to turn out cold.
Swiss Pudding appears to have little to do with Switzerland; the name is found in English and American cookbooks for a layered crumb-and-apple pudding of the same family as brown betty and the German Apfelcharlotte, where stale bread does the work that pastry or batter would do in a costlier dish. Its presence here is a matter of commerce rather than tradition: The Story of Crisco (1913) was published by Procter & Gamble to teach cooks what to do with a brand-new hydrogenated vegetable shortening, and its "Calendar of Dinners" assigns a menu to every day of the year, substituting Crisco where butter, lard or suet would otherwise have stood. This one is dated April 24 — late in the storage-apple season, when last autumn's fruit would be soft and worth cooking down.