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February 26
Menu: Cream of Beet Soup; Pork Tenderloins, Apple Sauce; Baked and Glazed Potatoes; Buttered Parsnips; Raisin Pudding, Liquid Sauce; Coffee Raisin Pudding-Wash and dry 1 pound Sultana raisins; Crisco a pudding dish; put in a layer of boiled rice, over it a layer of raisins, and continue until the dish is nearly full, having rice on top. Beat 2 eggs; add 2 teaspoons sugar, 1 pinch of salt, 3 tablespoons melted Crisco, and 2 cups sweet milk; pour pour it over pudding, and bake ½ hour. Serve with liquid sauce.
A rice-and-raisin baked custard from Crisco's day-by-day dinner calendar, written for cooks who already had leftover boiled rice on hand. The gaps in the instructions are all in the quantities and the oven.
- "Crisco a pudding dish"Crisco is used as a verb throughout this book: it means grease the dish with shortening. Butter or a neutral oil does the same job, and the melted Crisco in the custard can be replaced measure for measure with melted butter or oil.
- How much riceNo amount is given; the recipe simply calls for boiled rice, already cooked. To nearly fill a dish of about 2 quarts in layers you would need roughly 3 to 4 cups cooked rice, or about 1 to 1 1/4 cups raw. Cook it plain and let it cool before layering so the grains stay separate.
- A pound of raisins is a lotA full pound against 3 to 4 cups of rice gives a pudding that is more fruit than grain and quite sweet. Half a pound is closer to modern taste; with only 2 teaspoons of sugar in the custard, the sweetness was presumably meant to come mostly from the fruit.
- SultanasUsually sold now as golden raisins, though the modern product is not identical. Ordinary dark raisins work. Washing and drying was worth doing when dried fruit was sold loose from the barrel; packaged fruit today needs only a rinse if you like, or nothing at all.
- Sweet milkSimply fresh unsoured milk, as distinguished from the buttermilk or clabber also kept in the kitchen. Use whole milk; skim gives a watery set.
- Oven temperatureNone is given. A moderate oven, around 350F, is a reasonable modern equivalent. The custard is thin (2 eggs to 2 cups milk), so bake until the centre is just set and no longer soupy when the dish is tipped; in a modern oven this may take longer than the half hour stated.
- Guard against curdlingStanding the dish in a pan of hot water helps keep the egg from breaking into grains at the edges before the middle sets, though the recipe does not call for it.
- "Liquid sauce"A pouring sauce, as opposed to the hard sauce of the same era: a thin vanilla or lemon sauce thickened with a little cornstarch, or a light custard sauce. Serve the pudding warm.
- YieldMade in a dish of about 2 quarts, it feeds six to eight as a family dessert.
Procter & Gamble's Crisco cookbooks of the 1910s were advertising books with a cookbook inside them, and a day-by-day calendar of dinners gave a full menu for every day of the year so that the new hydrogenated vegetable shortening would appear in every course, from pie crust to greased pudding dishes. Baked rice puddings themselves are far older and thoroughly domestic: rice, milk, eggs and dried fruit made a filling sweet out of pantry staples and, in this version, out of yesterday's boiled rice. The choice of Sultanas points to the imported Mediterranean and Californian dried-fruit trade that had made raisins cheap and ordinary in American kitchens by then. What is new here is only the fat, and the fact that the manufacturer expected it to replace butter and lard.