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August 10
Menu: Tomato Bisque Croutons; Potato Croquettes; Fried Egg Plant; Celery and Apple Salad; Chocolate Pudding; Coffee Chocolate Pudding-Crisco a mold or basin. Beat 3 tablespoons Crisco and 2 tablespoons sugar to a cream, then beat in 3 yolks of eggs. Dissolve 1/2 teacups grated chocolate smoothly in 1 cup milk, add it to Crisco mixture, with 2 cups cakecrumbs, 1 teaspoon vanilla, 1½ teaspoon salt, and whites of eggs stiffly beaten. Fold the whites in gently. Pour into prepared mold, cover with Criscoed paper and steam for 2 hours. Turn out and serve with white sauce. This mixture may be placed in a Criscoed pudding dish and baked in a moderate oven.
A steamed cake-crumb pudding from Crisco's own promotional cookbook, where the shortening does duty as both fat and pan grease. The method is sound; the measurements need interpretation.
- The salt is a typo1½ teaspoons of salt in a small pudding is far too much and almost certainly stands for ½ teaspoon or less. Use ¼ teaspoon and taste the batter before folding in the whites.
- Teacups and grated chocolateA teacup in this period is smaller than a measuring cup, roughly 1/2 to 3/4 of one, so the quantity is genuinely ambiguous; about 1/3 cup grated unsweetened chocolate (around 2 oz) gives a pudding in keeping with the sugar called for. Grated chocolate means a solid bar block, not cocoa powder or chips.
- Crisco and "Criscoed"Crisco is hydrogenated vegetable shortening and still sold; unsalted butter creams better and tastes better here. "Criscoed paper" is simply greased parchment or foil tied over the mold to keep condensation out.
- Egg whitesThe recipe names three yolks and then "whites of eggs" without a number: use the three whites from the same eggs. Beat them to soft, not dry, peaks so they fold in without deflating.
- Cake crumbsTwo cups of dry crumbs from plain white or sponge cake, not fresh moist cake. Stale pound cake or a plain sponge dried in a low oven works; breadcrumbs make a coarser, more traditionally British pudding.
- SteamingFill the mold no more than two-thirds, set it on a rack in a covered pot with boiling water reaching halfway up the sides, and keep the water at a bare simmer. Top up with boiling water as it evaporates; two hours is right for a 1½ quart mold.
- The baked optionA moderate oven in this period means roughly 350 to 375F. Baked in a greased dish it will take roughly 45 to 55 minutes and set firmer and drier than the steamed version.
- White sauceIn a dessert context this is not a savory bechamel but a sweet pouring sauce: milk thickened with a little cornstarch or flour, sweetened and flavored with vanilla. A thin custard or crème anglaise serves the same purpose.
- YieldSix to eight servings. Turn the pudding out while still hot, or the fat will set and it will stick.
The Story of Crisco (1913) was published by Procter & Gamble to teach American cooks what to do with hydrogenated cottonseed oil, a product with no culinary tradition behind it. The book's tactic was to take dishes households already knew and rewrite them with Crisco standing in for butter, lard and suet, hence the odd verb "to Crisco a mold." A steamed chocolate pudding was a shrewd choice: the genre descends from British suet puddings boiled in a cloth or basin, and suet was exactly the animal fat the company wanted to displace. The "Calendar of Dinners" section that frames it belongs to another convention of the era, the day-by-day menu planner that spared the housekeeper the daily decision of what to serve. Crisco was also marketed as acceptable to kosher households and to vegetarians, a selling point the book returns to more than once.