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December 12
Menu: Baked Codfish; Piquant Beets; Turn; Baked Potatoes; Lettuce and Cheese Salad; Coffee; Bread Pudding Bread Pudding-4 cups bread cut in dice, 3 tablespoons sultanas, 2 tablespoons chopped candied peel, 3 tablespoons sugar, 1 tablespoon Crisco, rind of 1 lemon, 2 eggs, ½ tablespoon lemon juice, 1 cup milk, and 4 lumps of sugar. Put lump sugar in dry saucepan and heat until it turns dark brown. Add milk and stir it over fire until sugar dissolves. Mix bread, cleaned sultanas, chopped peel, sugar, Crisco, grated lemon rind, and colored milk. Beat up eggs and add them with lemon juice. Let mixture stand for 12 an hour, or longer, if bread is stale. Have ready Criscoed mold, put in mixture, cover top with piece of Criscoed paper, and steam it for 2 hours. Turn carefully on to hot dish and serve with it any good sweet sauce.
A steamed bread pudding, darkened and faintly bitter-sweet from caramelized lump sugar dissolved into the milk. A few of its instructions are typographical casualties or assume equipment that has left most kitchens.
- "12 an hour" is half an hourThe fraction lost its slash in printing. The soaked mixture rests 30 minutes, longer if the bread is dry enough to resist the milk.
- The caramel is the hingeMelting the lump sugar dry until it turns dark brown is what gives the pudding its color and its slight edge of bitterness. Take it to a deep amber, not black, and stand back when the milk goes in — it will seize and spit before it dissolves back into the syrup over low heat.
- CriscoStill sold, and still works here, though the formula was reworked in the 2000s to cut trans fats. Butter can stand in at the same quantity — it is not a chemical equivalent, since butter carries water and milk solids, but at one tablespoon the difference is negligible, and many will prefer the flavour.
- Lump sugarLumps were cut from loaf sugar and varied in size; taking them at something near a modern cube, about a teaspoon each, four lumps comes to roughly 4 teaspoons. This is separate from the 3 tablespoons of sugar mixed into the bread.
- Sultanas and candied peelSultanas are the closest thing to what American shops sell as golden raisins. "Cleaned" means picking out stems and grit, unnecessary with packaged fruit. Candied peel means citron, orange or lemon peel in sugar syrup, sold at Christmas in most supermarkets and year-round from baking suppliers.
- The liquid is tightOne cup of milk to four cups of diced bread gives a firm, sliceable pudding rather than a custard. The recipe's own remedy for stale bread is to let the mixture stand longer, not to add more milk.
- Steaming setupA 1½-quart pudding basin or metal mold, greased, with greased parchment tied over the top, set on a rack in a deep pot with boiling water reaching halfway up the sides. Keep it at a bare simmer and top up with boiling water as it goes; two hours is accurate, and a skewer should come out clean.
- Yield and sauceRoughly six servings. "Any good sweet sauce" would in this period mean something like a hard sauce, a lemon or vanilla cornstarch sauce, or a thin custard — poured over as the pudding is unmolded hot.
The Story of Crisco (1913) was written by Marion Harris Neil, cookery editor of the Ladies' Home Journal, for Procter & Gamble, who had introduced the hydrogenated cottonseed shortening two years earlier and needed to teach American cooks what to do with a solid white fat that was neither butter nor lard. Dried fruit, candied peel and a steamed mold place this pudding squarely in the run-up to Christmas, borrowed from the British boiled-pudding tradition that American cookbooks kept alive through the nineteenth century. Burnt sugar used largely for color, as here, was a standard trick of the period, appearing in commercial gravy brownings and "blackjack" caramel colorings; it lets a thrift dish made of leftover bread arrive at the table looking like something richer.</paragraph>