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December 24
Menu: Vegetarian; Cream of Tomato Soup; Cheese Souffle; Graham Rolls; Lettuce, French Dressing; Eve's Pudding; Springerlie; Coffee Eve's Pudding-Mix together in a basin, 1 cup seeded raisins, 3 tablespoons Crisco, 1/2 teaspoon salt, 2 cups crumbs, 1 cup currants, 8 chopped apples, 1 teaspoon each, cinnamon, cloves, and nutmeg, 14 cup milk, and 4 well beaten eggs. Pour into Criscoed mold, cover with greased paper and steam 2 hours. Serve with hot milk. Tomato Soup Roast Turkey, Cranberry Jelly Roast Sweet Potatoes Mashed Turnips Brussels Sprouts Orange and Celery Salad Vanilla Blanc-mange English Plum Pudding Fruit Coffee English Plum Pudding-1 cupful breadcrumbs, 1 cupful flour, 1 cupful brown sugar, 1/2 cupful Crisco, 1 teaspoonful salt, 2 teaspoonfuls baking powder, 1 teaspoonful mixed spices, 3 eggs, 1 cupful milk, ½ cupful seeded raisins, 1½ cupful chopped candied citron peel, 1 cupful currants, 1/2 cupful chopped preserved ginger, 1/4 cupful brandy, ½ cupful chopped English walnut meats. Mix flour with breadcrumbs, add Crisco, sugar, salt, baking powder, spices, nuts, fruit, milk, eggs well beaten, and brandy. Pour into Criscoed mold, cover with greased paper and steam steadily for four hours. Turn out and serve with liquid or hard sauce. The brandy may be omitted.
A steamed pudding built on shortening rather than the traditional suet, which was the whole point of its inclusion in a Crisco book. It behaves like a dense fruited steamed cake and needs a long, steady steam.
- Crisco and the suet questionHalf a cup of Crisco stands in for the shredded beef suet of a classic plum pudding. Any solid vegetable shortening works; butter gives better flavour but a slightly heavier, less tender crumb, since it carries water.
- Mixed spicesThis means the British pudding-spice blend: cinnamon, nutmeg, mace, cloves, allspice and ginger. One teaspoon total is modest for this much fruit, and doubling it will not hurt.
- The citron proportionA cup and a half of candied citron peel against half a cup of raisins is a lot of citron by modern taste. Swapping most of it for mixed peel, more raisins or chopped dates gives a more familiar balance.
- Preserved gingerStem ginger in syrup, drained and chopped, not crystallised ginger and not ground. Crystallised will work if you rinse off the sugar coating.
- The mould and the steamerThe quantities here make a large pudding, well over two quarts of mixture, so use a basin or mould with room to spare and fill it no more than two-thirds. Grease it, cover with greased paper and then foil, tie down, and stand it on a rack in a covered pot with boiling water reaching halfway up the sides.
- Four hours, and the water levelThe time is right for a pudding this size, but the water must stay at a bare, steady simmer and be topped up with boiling water every hour. If the pot boils dry the pudding scorches and the mould can crack.
- Baking powder means eat it soonTwo teaspoons of baking powder make this a quick pudding, not a keeping one. Unlike a suet-and-brandy Christmas pudding matured for weeks, this is best served the day it is steamed, or resteamed for an hour the next day.
- UnmouldingLet it stand five to ten minutes off the heat before turning out, or the hot crumb tears. Serve with hard sauce (butter beaten with icing sugar and brandy) or a warm custard.
- YieldServes eight to ten in the small wedges these puddings are meant to be cut into.
The Story of Crisco (1913), written by Marion Harris Neil for Procter & Gamble, was an advertising cookbook for a product launched only two years earlier: hydrogenated cottonseed oil sold as a clean, neutral, shelf-stable replacement for lard and suet. A plum pudding was a shrewd recipe to include, because suet was the one fat everybody associated with Christmas and the one hardest for a manufacturer to displace; the book also points to Crisco being acceptable in kosher and vegetarian kitchens where beef fat was not. The pudding's name is older than its ingredients suggest — "plum" in English cookery long meant a dried raisin or prune, and the boiled plum pudding is generally traced to the spiced meat-and-dried-fruit pottages of the seventeenth century by way of the flour-thickened puddings of the eighteenth. The "December 26" line printed after the recipe is the heading of the following day's menu (Stuffed Veal Heart, Tomato Sauce), not a date attached to the pudding.
A steamed pudding built on shortening rather than the traditional suet, which was the whole point of its inclusion in a Crisco book. It behaves like a dense fruited steamed cake and needs a long, steady steam.
- Crisco and the suet questionHalf a cup of Crisco stands in for the shredded beef suet of a classic plum pudding. Any solid vegetable shortening works; butter gives better flavour but a slightly heavier, less tender crumb, since it carries water.
- Mixed spicesThis means the British pudding-spice blend: cinnamon, nutmeg, mace, cloves, allspice and ginger. One teaspoon total is modest for this much fruit, and doubling it will not hurt.
- The citron proportionA cup and a half of candied citron peel against half a cup of raisins is a lot of citron by modern taste. Swapping most of it for mixed peel, more raisins or chopped dates gives a more familiar balance.
- Preserved gingerStem ginger in syrup, drained and chopped, not crystallised ginger and not ground. Crystallised will work if you rinse off the sugar coating.
- The mould and the steamerThe quantities here make a large pudding, well over two quarts of mixture, so use a basin or mould with room to spare and fill it no more than two-thirds. Grease it, cover with greased paper and then foil, tie down, and stand it on a rack in a covered pot with boiling water reaching halfway up the sides.
- Four hours, and the water levelThe time is right for a pudding this size, but the water must stay at a bare, steady simmer and be topped up with boiling water every hour. If the pot boils dry the pudding scorches and the mould can crack.
- Baking powder means eat it soonTwo teaspoons of baking powder make this a quick pudding, not a keeping one. Unlike a suet-and-brandy Christmas pudding matured for weeks, this is best served the day it is steamed, or resteamed for an hour the next day.
- UnmouldingLet it stand five to ten minutes off the heat before turning out, or the hot crumb tears. Serve with hard sauce (butter beaten with icing sugar and brandy) or a warm custard.
- YieldServes eight to ten in the small wedges these puddings are meant to be cut into.
The Story of Crisco (1913), written by Marion Harris Neil for Procter & Gamble, was an advertising cookbook for a product launched only two years earlier: hydrogenated cottonseed oil sold as a clean, neutral, shelf-stable replacement for lard and suet. A plum pudding was a shrewd recipe to include, because suet was the one fat everybody associated with Christmas and the one hardest for a manufacturer to displace; the book also points to Crisco being acceptable in kosher and vegetarian kitchens where beef fat was not. The pudding's name is older than its ingredients suggest — "plum" in English cookery long meant a dried raisin or prune, and the boiled plum pudding is generally traced to the spiced meat-and-dried-fruit pottages of the seventeenth century by way of the flour-thickened puddings of the eighteenth. The "December 26" line printed after the recipe is the heading of the following day's menu (Stuffed Veal Heart, Tomato Sauce), not a date attached to the pudding.