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April 28
Menu: Shad, Stuffed and Baked,; Clam Cocktail; Brown Butter Sauce; Mashed Potatoes; Beets Stuffed with Peppers; Caramel Custard; Coffee Caramel Custard-4 eggs and 1 yolk, 1/2 cup sugar, 1 pint milk, and 1 teaspoon lemon extract. Have plain tin pudding mold, put 3 tablespoons sugar into small saucepan and stir till it becomes quite brown like coffee. Pour this into mold and run it all over bottom of it. Crisco then sides gether till mixed well, then add milk of mold, beat eggs and sugar topared mold, and flavoring. Pour all into precover with piece of Criscoed paper; have stewpan with an inch of boiling water in it; put saucer or something flat in bottom of it, set pudding tin on this, and slowly for at least 1 hour. It must pan with lid. Let steam not boil, but be set on part of stove cover where it will keep hot without boiling. Turn out and serve hot or cold.
The original text has been scrambled in typesetting — whole phrases have jumped between lines — so read it as a caramel custard steamed in a water bath: caramelise sugar in the mould, beat eggs with sugar, add milk and flavouring, pour in, cover, and steam gently until set. The points below sort out the sequence and the numbers.
- What the garbled lines should sayReassembled, the method is: caramelise 3 tablespoons sugar in a small pan, pour into the mould and swirl over the bottom, then grease ("Crisco") the sides. Beat the eggs and 1/2 cup sugar together until well mixed, add the milk and the lemon extract, pour into the prepared mould, and cover with a piece of greased paper.
- The hinge: never let the water boilThe instruction that decides success is "let it steam, not boil." Water at a full boil drives the custard past about 180F and it curdles into a weeping, pitted mess. Keep the water at a bare shiver, and start checking at 45 minutes even though the recipe says an hour.
- MeasuresA pint of milk is 2 cups. Whole milk gives the texture intended here; the extra yolk is doing the enriching work that cream would otherwise do.
- CriscoCrisco was new in 1911 and this book exists to promote it. Any neutral solid fat or a light film of butter greases the mould and the cover paper just as well.
- The mouldA "plain tin pudding mold" is a smooth-sided, un-fluted metal form; the recipe gives no size, but a pint of milk plus five eggs' worth of egg makes roughly 1 1/2 pints, so a straight-sided cake tin or a 1-quart metal bowl will hold it. Fluting traps the caramel and makes unmoulding a fight.
- Oven instead of stovetopIf you would rather not nurse a stewpan, the same custard sets in a water bath in a 325F oven, again covered, in roughly the same time. The saucer under the mould in the original is there to keep the tin off the direct heat of the pan bottom; a folded towel does the same job.
- Testing and unmouldingIt is done when the centre barely wobbles as a unit and a knife slid in an inch from the edge comes out clean. Let it settle briefly before inverting; the recipe allows serving either hot or cold.
- YieldA pint of milk and five eggs' worth of egg serves four to six, depending on whether it is the whole dessert or part of a larger meal.
- FlavouringA teaspoon of lemon extract is assertive by modern taste and reads as old-fashioned; vanilla, or the zest of half a lemon steeped in the warm milk and strained out, is closer to what most cooks now expect with caramel.
The Story of Crisco (1913, Procter & Gamble) was a promotional cookbook built around a genuinely new product: hydrogenated cottonseed oil, sold as a shortening that would not go rancid like lard — and marketed, in the campaign around it, as suitable for cooks keeping kosher or avoiding animal fat. The "Calendar of Dinners" material this custard is generally associated with, though its relationship to the 1913 volume is not straightforward, gave a full menu for every day of the year, with Crisco threaded through as many dishes as could plausibly take it — here it does nothing more than grease a mould, which shows how determined the copywriters were. The dish itself is the standard nineteenth-century steamed caramel custard, the English and American cousin of French crème caramel and Spanish flan, and the water-bath-on-the-stovetop method belonged to a period when a range's oven heat was hard to hold steady but a cool corner of the stove top was easy to find.