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December 14
Menu: Corn Chowder; Bread Sticks; Chicken and Chestnut Salad; Stuffed Celery; Raisin Puffs, Vanilla Sauce; Coffee Raisin Puffs-Beat 2 tablespoons Crisco with 1/2 cup sugar till creamy, add 1 beaten egg, 1/4 teaspoon salt, 1/2 cup milk, 1½ cups flour sifted with 2 teaspoons baking powder, 1/2 teaspoon grated nutmeg, and 1 cup chopped raisins. Crisco baking cups and fill half full with mixture and steam for 1 hour.
A small steamed pudding batter, dropped into greased cups and set over water rather than baked. The book's house style uses the brand as a verb, which is the only line likely to puzzle a modern reader.
- "Crisco baking cups" is an instruction, not an ingredientIt means grease the cups with shortening. The brand name is used as a verb throughout this book, which Procter & Gamble published to promote the product.
- The fatCrisco in 1913 was hydrogenated cottonseed oil, softer and blander than butter. Modern all-vegetable shortening behaves the same way; butter works too and gives more flavour, though the crumb will be slightly less tender.
- Steaming setupCover each cup with foil or a square of buttered parchment tied on, stand them on a rack in a deep pot, and add boiling water to come halfway up the sides. Keep it at a bare simmer and top up with boiling water so it never runs dry.
- Half full mattersBaking powder plus an hour of steam gives a lot of lift. Fill past halfway and the batter climbs out from under its cover.
- Doneness and timingAn hour suits cups of roughly 5 to 6 fl oz, though the book gives no size; smaller cups will be done sooner, perhaps 35 to 40 minutes. Test with a skewer, which should come out clean, and the puff should spring back.
- NutmegGrate it fresh. Half a teaspoon of pre-ground nutmeg that has sat in a cupboard will contribute almost nothing, and the spice is doing most of the flavouring here.
- RaisinsChopping is worth doing rather than skipping, as whole raisins sink through a thin batter. Toss them with a spoonful of the measured flour first.
- Yield and servingAbout eight puffs, depending on cup size. Steamed puddings of this kind were usually served hot and unmoulded with a sweet pudding sauce or hard sauce, though this recipe specifies none; plain, they are quite dry.
The Story of Crisco was published by Procter & Gamble in 1913, two years after Crisco itself went on sale, and its recipes were written by Marion Harris Neil, then cookery editor of the Ladies' Home Journal. The book's job was to persuade cooks that a hydrogenated vegetable fat could replace both butter and lard in every department of the kitchen, which is why the brand name appears in nearly every line and even functions as a verb. The "Calendar of Dinners" section supplied a menu for each day of the year, and this puff belongs to December 15 -- small steamed puddings were common midwinter fare in American and British kitchens, cooked on the stove top rather than in the oven, and relying on dried fruit at a season when fresh fruit was scarce.