Home › A Calendar of Dinners › August 23
August 23
Menu: Fish Timbales, Cream Sauce; Mashed Potatoes Stewed Okra; Cucumber Salad; Cheese Straws; St. Leonard's Pudding; Coffee St. Leonard's Pudding-Line edge of a pudding dish with pastry, and spread 2 tablespoons of jam in the bottom. Blend 4 tablespoons Crisco with 1/2 cup flour, when smooth stir in 1 cup milk, 4 tablespoons sugar, 1 teaspoon vanilla extract, 1/2 teaspoon salt, and 2 yolks of eggs, stir well together and pour over jam, bake 30 minutes. Beat up whites of eggs to a stiff froth, add 1 tablespoon sugar, and arrange roughly on the top. Place in oven until lightly browned.
A jam-bottomed baked custard under meringue, of the Manchester-pudding family. The printed page runs the recipe straight into the next day's dinner menu, so the trailing "August 24 Boiled Mutton, Caper Sauce" belongs to the calendar, not the pudding.
- The hinge: no lumpsCrisco creamed with flour makes a paste, and cold milk stirred into it will seize into lumps if added all at once. Add the milk a few spoonfuls at a time, working smooth before each addition, or press the finished mixture through a sieve before it goes over the jam.
- Oven temperatureNo heat is given; the recipe says only 'bake 30 minutes'. A moderate oven, around 350F, suits a flour-thickened custard of this size. Thirty minutes at that heat should leave it just set with a slight wobble at the centre; a longer bake curdles it.
- Browning the meringueThe recipe says only to return it to the oven until lightly browned: 10-15 minutes at the same moderate heat will dry and colour it, or run it under a broiler for a minute or two watching constantly. The custard beneath is already cooked and will weep if it is given a second long bake.
- "Line edge with pastry"Only the rim is pastry, not the base. Press a band of shortcrust around the top inside edge of the dish; it gives a crisp collar and nothing more.
- CriscoThe all-vegetable shortening the book exists to sell. It is still sold, though the formula has been changed since the book's day. Butter can be substituted in the custard base for better flavour, bearing in mind butter carries water that shortening does not; the pastry edge will be less short.
- Dish sizeNo dimensions are given. A 1-quart pie or pudding dish is right for this quantity; anything wider gives a custard layer too thin to set properly under the meringue.
- JamTwo tablespoons is a thin smear rather than a layer. Raspberry or apricot is traditional; if you want it to read as a distinct stratum, three or four tablespoons is closer to modern taste.
- YieldFour modest servings, or six alongside other things. Best eaten warm the day it is made, as the meringue softens and beads overnight in the refrigerator.
The Story of Crisco was Procter & Gamble's promotional cookbook for the hydrogenated shortening it introduced in 1911, and "A Calendar of Dinners" was a companion title in the same P&G series, supplying a year of menus with recipes tucked between them, which is why a pudding here collides on the page with a note for the next day's boiled mutton. The pudding itself is older than the fat it is made with: jam spread in a lined dish, a flour-thickened custard poured over, and a meringue browned on top is the standard shape of the English nursery pudding, close kin to the Manchester and Queen of Puddings. Saints' names attached to such dishes are usually parish or institutional rather than culinary, and the connection to St Leonard is traditional rather than documented. What the recipe records most clearly is the sales pitch: a dish once built on butter or suet, rewritten for the shortening its publisher was selling.