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Baked Rhubarb Pudding
2 cupfuls flour. ½ teaspoonful salt 2 bundles rhubarb ½ cupful Crisco 1 lemon 6 tablespoonfuls brown sugar Water ½ cupful granulated sugar Put granulated sugar into small saucepan over fire, and when brown, coat inside of plain pudding mold with it. Sift, flour, salt, and baking powder together, rub Crisco finely into it, then mix whole to a smooth Puddings paste with cold water. Turn out on a floured board, cut off one-third of it, and put one side for the lid. Roll out remainder until twice the circumference of the top of the mold, then drop gently into mold, pressing evenly against sides. Fill center with rhubarb, cut in pieces an inch long. Add grated rind and strained juice of half of the lemon, brown sugar and 3 tablespoonfuls water. Roll out pastry that was put on one side, wet edges of it, lay it on top. Cover with a piece of greased paper, and bake in moderate oven one hour. Turn out and serve with hot milk.
A suet-pudding-style crust baked rather than steamed, lining a caramel-coated mold. The ingredient list as printed is incomplete, so read the method first and work out the pastry from it.
- The list is missing its flour and baking powderThe method calls for flour, salt and baking powder sifted together, but neither the flour nor the baking powder appears in the quantities given. The original supplies no amounts and none can honestly be extracted from it; any figure a cook uses is guesswork.
- "2 bundles rhubarb"A "bundle" was presumably a tied bunch of stalks, but no standard weight attaches to the term, so 2 lb trimmed is only a rough guess. Buy by weight and adjust to the mold rather than by count of bunches.
- Rhubarb leavesOnly the stalks are eaten. The leaves contain oxalic acid in quantity and are cut away and discarded; supermarket rhubarb usually arrives already trimmed.
- Moderate oven350F. One hour will cook the crust through and collapse the rhubarb; if the top browns too fast, the greased paper called for is doing exactly the job it was meant to do.
- The caramel liningMelting 1½ cupfuls of granulated sugar dry in a small pan gives a caramel that sets hard the instant it touches metal, so have the mold warmed and work fast, tilting to coat. This is the hinge of the dish: the caramel is what glazes the pudding when it is turned out, and burnt caramel will make the whole thing bitter.
- Mold sizeProbably a plain pudding basin or charlotte mold of about 2 quarts, though the recipe does not say. Grease it before caramelising if you want any hope of unmolding cleanly, and let the baked pudding stand five minutes before inverting so the caramel loosens.
- Crisco in the pastryCrisco here stands in for suet or lard, and modern vegetable shortening behaves the same way — rub it in cold and stop while the mixture is still crumbly. Cold water only, and no kneading beyond bringing it together.
- ServingHot milk poured over is the period sauce; warm cream or a thin custard does the same work. The pudding serves six to eight and is best the day it is made, as the crust softens under the fruit juice overnight.
The Story of Crisco was published by Procter & Gamble in the 1910s to teach American cooks what to do with a wholly new product: hydrogenated cottonseed oil, sold as a shelf-stable, neutral-tasting substitute for lard and butter. That commercial purpose explains why a traditional English boiled-pudding formula turns up here at all — a rhubarb pudding lined with pastry and turned out under a caramel glaze is the sort of dish a Victorian cook made with chopped beef suet, and the book's argument is that Crisco does the job without the meat flavour, the kosher objection, or the summer rancidity. Rhubarb itself was a spring staple in kitchen gardens, the first "fruit" of the year and cheap enough to be cooked in bulk; the heavy hand with sugar in recipes of this kind reflects how sour the unimproved garden varieties were.</invoke>