December 22

The text breaks off mid-instruction, so what survives is the custard base of a baked cornstarch soufflé — milk, cornstarch, sugar and yolks cooked to a thick pastry-cream, which was then almost certainly folded with the whipped whites and baked. Treat the fragment as a base and finish it by standard practice.

• The recipe is incompleteIt ends at "Stir and cook 8 minutes then" — the folding of the beaten whites, the dish, the oven and the time are all missing. Anything after the eight minutes of cooking is reconstruction, not the book's instruction.
• Crisco, then and nowCrisco in 1913 was a hydrogenated cottonseed shortening; today's product is a soy/palm blend, reformulated in the 2000s to cut trans fats to negligible levels. The single tablespoon in a quart of milk adds a little richness and may help discourage a skin; butter would do the same job.
• Temper the yolk mixtureBeating cornstarch, sugar and five yolks into hot milk all at once risks scrambling. Whisk a ladle of the hot milk into the yolk mixture first, then return it to the pan.
• Cook the starch outEight minutes of stirring over moderate heat is not padding: cornstarch needs sustained heat past thickening to lose its raw, chalky taste, and the yolks' amylase must be denatured or the pudding will thin as it stands. Stir constantly and reach a full simmer.
• Oven, if you bake itThe surviving text gives no oven instruction. In period cookbooks a "moderate" oven is generally taken as somewhere around 350F, and puddings of this kind were often baked in a buttered dish set in a pan of hot water. Any time or temperature here is a modern guess, not the book's.
• WhitesThe five whites left over are the leavening. Beat them to soft peaks and fold in while the base is warm but not hot, in two or three additions.
• YieldA quart of milk with five eggs makes a large dish — eight generous servings. It is closer to a set custard pudding than to a modern airy soufflé and will not collapse as dramatically.