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December 5
Menu: Brown Fricassee of Chicken, Cranberry; Sweet Potatoes; Jelly; Boiled Onions; Orange and Pineapple Salad; Farina Pudding; Coffee Farina Pudding-Stir into 3 cups boiling milk 1 cup farina, and cook 10 minutes. Rub together 1 tablespoon Crisco and 2 tablespoons sugar; add yolks of 3 eggs, grated rind of 1 lemon and 25 chopped blanched almonds. Stir this mixture into farina after it is little cooled; lastly add whites of 3 eggs beaten to stiff froth. Steam this pudding in covered mold for 1½ hours. Serve with any sweet pudding sauce.
A steamed farina pudding from the December menus, lightened with beaten whites and enriched with yolks, lemon and almonds. The method is sound; only the vocabulary and the vessel need translating.
- What farina isFarina here is finely milled wheat, the endosperm ground to a fine granular meal, sold today as Cream of Wheat or similar hot cereal. Semolina works and gives a slightly grainier, firmer pudding; do not substitute instant or flavoured cereals, which are pre-cooked and will turn to paste.
- The ratio is deliberateThree cups of milk to one cup of farina cooks to a very stiff porridge in ten minutes. That thickness is what lets the pudding stand when unmoulded, so resist the urge to loosen it.
- Crisco and the substituteOne tablespoon of shortening creamed with sugar is doing the work of butter. Butter is the obvious swap and improves the flavour; the book specifies Crisco because it is an advertising cookbook.
- Cool before the yolks"After it is little cooled" is the hinge. Beat the yolk mixture into farina that is still hot and it scrambles into threads; let the pan sit off the heat five to ten minutes, until it is warm rather than steaming.
- Folding the whitesStiff whites will fight a mass this dense. Slacken the farina with a spoonful of the whites first, then fold the rest in in two additions, cutting through rather than stirring.
- The mold and the steamerGrease a 1½ to 2 quart pudding basin or tube mold and dust it with sugar or fine crumbs. Cover it tightly with a lid or with pleated foil tied down, stand it on a rack in a deep pot, and add boiling water to come halfway up the sides. Keep the water at a bare simmer and top it up as it evaporates over the ninety minutes.
- Blanched almondsTwenty-five almonds is roughly a scant quarter cup. Buy them blanched, or drop whole almonds into boiling water for a minute and slip the skins off; chop them fine so they suspend rather than sink.
- Doneness and turning outA skewer into the centre should come out clean and the pudding should have pulled slightly from the mold. Let it rest ten minutes before inverting, or the hot centre will slump.
- Yield and sauceThe recipe gives no yield; it should serve about six. "Any sweet pudding sauce" would cover a thin vanilla or lemon custard sauce, a hard sauce, or a fruit syrup; the lemon rind in the pudding takes well to a raspberry or apricot sauce.
- The stray word in the title"Coffee" is not part of the recipe. It appears to have been carried over from the December 4 dinner menu that this pudding belongs to.
The Story of Crisco (1913) was written by Marion Harris Neil to introduce American cooks to a wholly new product: a solid vegetable shortening made from cottonseed oil by hydrogenation, brought to market by Procter & Gamble in 1911. The Crisco recipe books were paired with a "Calendar of Dinners" giving a menu for each day of the year, which is why this pudding arrives dated December 4 with the coffee still attached. The dish itself is older than the fat in it: steamed farina and semolina puddings, bound with yolks and raised with beaten whites, were long familiar in Central European cooking and appear in nineteenth-century American books and in the domestic-science manuals that followed. What the Crisco book adds is the substitution itself, a single tablespoon of shortening standing where butter had always stood, repeated across hundreds of recipes until the swap looked ordinary.