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December 20
Menu: Lentil Soup; Roast Loin of Pork, Apple Sauce; Potato Balls Artichokes; Celery and Pineapple Salad; Sultana Pudding; Coffee Sultana Pudding-Line shallow dish with plain pastry, put in bottom layer of sultana raisins. Beat 1/2 cup Crisco to a cream with 4 tablespoons sugar, add 2 well beaten eggs, 2 tablespoons milk, 1/2 teaspoon lemon extract, 14 teaspoon salt, and ½ cup flour. Mix and spread on top of raisins and bake 30 minutes in moderate oven. Serve cold.
A shallow pastry case with a raisin base and a light creamed sponge poured over — closer to an English tart than a boiled pudding. It needs only a few adjustments.
- Moderate ovenRead as about 350F. Thirty minutes suits a shallow tin; the recipe does not give a size, and a deeper dish will need longer, with the pastry rim shielded once it colours.
- CriscoThe book is a Crisco promotion, so the shortening is the point. Half a cup is 4 fl oz, about 3½ oz by weight. Butter creams and browns better and will give more flavour; a modern all-vegetable shortening will behave much as written.
- The salt quantityThe printed "14 teaspoon salt" is a quarter teaspoon. A whole 14 teaspoons would be inedible.
- SultanasGolden raisins in American terms. Plump them in hot water or a little sherry for ten minutes and pat dry, or they draw moisture from the batter and stay leathery.
- The batter is thin on flourHalf a cup of flour to two eggs and half a cup of fat gives a soft, almost custardy sponge. Spread it gently over the fruit rather than stirring it in, and expect a layered result, not a uniform cake.
- Blind-bakingThe recipe puts raw pastry, fruit and wet batter in together. A brief blind bake of the shell — 10 minutes at 400F with weights — prevents a damp base.
- Lemon extractExtract was a common flavouring in books of this kind. The finely grated zest of one lemon gives a cleaner result in the same quantity of batter.
- YieldA small quantity of batter over a shallow case; expect around six modest portions, though no dish size is specified. It is directed to be served cold, and it does firm up usefully as it cools.
The Story of Crisco (1913) was published by Procter & Gamble to teach cooks what to do with hydrogenated cottonseed oil, a product with no culinary tradition behind it. A "Calendar of Dinners" format, assigning a menu to every day of the year, appears in the company's promotional cookery literature, and this pudding sits among the December entries, when dried fruit dishes came into their own. Sultanas ame is is generally traced to sultan/sultana, by way of the Sultanina grape eached American kements through Smyrna and later California, and were prized over ordinary raisins for baking because they needed no stoning. The dish itself belongs to a broad family of British fruit-and-sponge tarts; what marks it as promotional literature rather than an old family receipt is that the shortening, not the fruit, is the thing being sold.