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August 21
Menu: Cold Sliced Corned Beef; Baked Potatoes; Jellied Vegetables; Pea Salad; Countess Pudding; Coffee Countess Pudding-Line small Criscoed platter with Crisco pastry. Put 1 tablespoon Crisco in saucepan, add 1 cup milk, when warm pour over three tablespoons chopped cocoanut, add 1 tablespoon sugar. Allow to remain 30 minutes, add 3 yolks of eggs well beaten, and 1/2 teaspoon vanilla, pour into platter, bake 30 minutes in hot oven. Beat up whites of eggs, add pinch salt, 1 tablespoon sugar, and 1/2 teaspoon almond extract, pile on top of pudding and sprinkle with cocoanut. Brown in slow oven. Serve hot or cold.
This is a coconut custard baked in a pastry shell and finished with meringue; the heading is a stray fragment of the menu line it sat on in the book's day-by-day calendar. The text is compressed to the point of garbling, so read it as: line a small greased ovenproof dish with pastry, then fill.
- "Line small Criscoed platter"The words run together in the original. It means: grease a small shallow ovenproof dish or pie plate with Crisco and line it with Crisco pastry. A 7- to 8-inch pie plate is the right size for this quantity.
- Oven temperaturesA "hot oven" in this period is usually taken as roughly 400-450F, which risks curdling an egg-yolk custard and drawing out liquid. Bake the filling at 325-350F until just set with a slight wobble at the center; a "slow oven" for the meringue is around 250-300F.
- Blind-bake the shellA wet custard poured into raw pastry at moderate heat gives a soggy base. Bake the lined dish empty at 400F until dry and pale gold, then lower the oven before filling.
- CocoanutRead as shredded or desiccated coconut, which at this date was generally sold unsweetened. Modern sweetened flake will make the pudding noticeably sweeter than intended; reduce or omit the tablespoon of sugar in the custard if that is what you have.
- The steeping stepThe 30 minutes in warm milk is the hinge. It softens the coconut and flavors the milk; skipping it leaves gritty shreds suspended in a bland custard. Let the milk cool to lukewarm before beating in the yolks, or they will scramble.
- CriscoStill sold, and the pastry behaves as written, though the modern formulation is no longer the hydrogenated cottonseed oil of 1913. Any solid vegetable shortening or lard works in its place.
- Almond extractHalf a teaspoon in three egg whites is assertive by current taste; a quarter teaspoon sits more quietly alongside the vanilla in the custard.
- YieldFour to six small servings. Best the day it is made; meringue on a custard base begins to weep after a few hours in the refrigerator.
The Story of Crisco (1913) was Procter & Gamble's book-length advertisement for the shortening it had launched two years earlier, with recipes largely credited to Marion Harris Neil, then cookery editor of Ladies' Home Journal. The "Calendar of Dinners" section gave a full menu for every day of the year, which is why this pudding carries a date and why it appears run together with a stray fragment of an adjacent menu line, and why the word Crisco appears three times in a recipe that scarcely needs it once. Puddings named for titled women -- Countess, Duchess, Empress -- were a common convention of Victorian and Edwardian cookery writing, and such names generally signalled little more than richness rather than any documented aristocratic connection. The dish itself belongs to the large family of baked custard tarts thickened with egg yolk alone, with the leftover whites turned into a soft meringue.