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December 30
Menu: Glazed Pumpkin; Sirloin Steak; Marbled Potatoes; Celery Salad; Cheese Relish; Boston Pudding; Coffee; Boston Pudding Cut 1 loaf bread; into thin slices and spread with; Crisco. Crisco baking dish, put into; it layer bread, sprinkle over 1 table-; spoon each cinnamon, cloves, ginger,; and nutmeg, then a layer seeded; raisins, and so on till dish is full.; Pour over 1 quart milk sweetened to; taste, with 3 well beaten eggs, allow; to soak 4 hours, then add 2 cups; more milk sweetened to taste. Cover; dish and bake moderate oven 3 hours.; Serve with wine sauce.
A layered bread-and-custard pudding from Crisco's dinner calendar, printed in the book's clipped telegraphic style. Two things need attention before you start: the spice quantities as written are enormous, and the four-hour soak belongs in the refrigerator.
- Read the spices as a total, not per layerA tablespoon each of cinnamon, cloves, ginger and nutmeg — four tablespoons of ground spice — would overwhelm a quart of custard, and the sentence structure implies it be repeated on every layer. Use about a teaspoon of cinnamon, half a teaspoon each of ginger and nutmeg, and a quarter teaspoon of cloves for the whole dish.
- CriscoVegetable shortening, then a novelty. Spread on bread slices it behaves like a flavourless butter. Softened butter gives a better result here; the book's purpose was to sell the alternative.
- "Crisco baking dish"An instruction, not an object: grease the dish with Crisco. The book uses the brand name as a verb throughout. A 9x13 pan or a 3-quart casserole holds a loaf of bread and three pints of liquid.
- Soak coldMilk and beaten egg left standing four hours at room temperature is how the original reads. Cover and soak it in the refrigerator instead — the bread absorbs just as well, and the custard goes into the oven cold, which suits the long slow bake.
- OvenA moderate oven in this period is usually taken as somewhere around 350F. For a custard this size, 325F is safer against curdling, and a water bath helps. Three hours is longer than needed at that temperature; check at 75 to 90 minutes and pull it when a knife inserted at the centre comes out clean and the custard no longer wobbles as a liquid.
- BreadA day-old white loaf, sliced thin, crusts left on. Fresh soft sandwich bread turns to paste after a long soak.
- Wine sauceThe period standard is a stirred sauce of butter, sugar, a beaten egg or a little cornflour, and sherry or Madeira, thinned with hot water and cooked over hot water until it coats a spoon. Hard sauce or plain cream also work.
- YieldA loaf of bread and six cups of milk feeds eight to ten as dessert. It reheats well, covered, and is good cold.
This is a thrift pudding dressed for company. Bread puddings of layered slices, dried fruit and sweetened milk custard were standard in American and English household cookery long before Crisco existed; the "Boston" label attached itself loosely to versions heavy with spice and raisins, in the same vein as Boston brown bread and Boston baked beans, both of which lean on molasses-and-spice New England habits. What is new is the context: the recipe sits in a Crisco-published "Calendar of Dinners", a menu for every day of the year built to show that Procter & Gamble's new hydrogenated cottonseed-oil shortening could stand in for butter and lard everywhere in the kitchen. The compressed, articles-omitted prose and the appearance of "Crisco" as a verb are marks of a promotional cookbook rather than a domestic-science one, and the stray heading — "Coffee", then the following day's codfish — is the calendar's menu framing bleeding into the recipe text.