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February 12
Menu: Gravy Soup; Fish Souffle; Beef Olives; Braised Turnips; Potato Puff; Carrots; Apple and Grapefruit Salad; Coburg Pudding; Coffee Coburg Pudding-3 cups milk, 1/2 cup rice, 1 cup boiling water, 1 egg, 4 tablespoons sugar, 1 teaspoon powdered cinnamon, 1 tablespoon Crisco, and 1/2 teaspoon salt. Well wash rice, sprinkle it into boiling water and cook gently until all water is absorbed. Heat milk, in double saucepan if possible, add halfcooked rice and boil gently until it is perfectly soft and of thick creamy consistency. Should it become too thick before it is really soft, add more milk. Beat egg, until very light, add half sugar to it. When rice is cooked, whisk egg in at once, a little at a time. Then add salt and piece of Crisco size of walnut. Turn mixture into dish in which it is to be served. Mix rest of sugar with cinnamon. Sprinkle this evenly over top of rice. Put rest of Crisco in small pieces over top of pudding just before it is required. Place pudding in front of fire, or in oven for second or two, when Crisco, etc., will form a delicious sauce over surface of pudding.
A stovetop rice pudding finished with a cinnamon-sugar crust rather than a long bake. The recipe reads oddly because the whole tablespoon of Crisco is divided across three moments, and the total does not quite add up.
- The hinge: temper the eggThe single beaten egg (already beaten with half the sugar) is whisked into the cooked rice a little at a time. The recipe does not say to remove the pan from the heat, but it is safest to do so: added all at once, or over the flame, the egg sets into threads in the pudding.
- Double saucepanA double boiler, or simply a heavy pan over low heat with frequent stirring. Milk and rice scorch quickly on the bottom, and the recipe leans on gentle, uninterrupted heat for however long the rice takes to go creamy; no time is given.
- "Piece of Crisco size of walnut"About one tablespoon in modern terms, which is the entire amount the ingredient list allows. Read the method as roughly half stirred into the pudding and half dotted on top; the arithmetic in the original is loose. Butter works identically if you are not committed to shortening.
- RiceUse a short or medium grain white rice. The parboil-then-milk method here is designed for a starchy grain that will thicken the milk; long grain basmati stays separate and gives a thin pudding.
- "In front of the fire"An open-hearth instruction for a top heat. A broiler for two to three minutes, watched, does the same job, or a few minutes in a hot oven; the recipe itself specifies no temperature, only "in oven for second or two." The point is to melt the fat and dissolve the sugar into a glaze, not to cook the pudding further.
- Timing of the toppingThe cinnamon sugar goes on as soon as the pudding is turned into its dish; only the remaining Crisco is dotted over "just before it is required," then flashed under heat.
- ConsistencyAim for something that just mounds on a spoon while hot; it sets considerably as it cools. The instruction to add more milk if it thickens before the rice softens is the one to follow freely.
- YieldNo yield is given; three cups of milk to half a cup of rice will serve about four. It is served warm in the dish the mixture is turned into.
Puddings named for Coburg appear across nineteenth-century British and American cookbooks, part of a broad fashion for attaching royal and continental place names to homely dishes after Victoria's 1840 marriage to Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha; the link is conventional rather than documented, and the name attaches to several quite different puddings. Underneath it this is plain boiled rice pudding, one of the cheapest sweet dishes in the repertoire, dressed up with a cinnamon-sugar crust. Its appearance here is commercial: The Story of Crisco (1913) was written by Marion Harris Neil for Procter & Gamble to demonstrate that their new hydrogenated cottonseed oil shortening, introduced in 1911, could stand in for butter and lard everywhere in the kitchen. The Calendar of Dinners section supplied a year of menus so that a housekeeper could not open the book without meeting Crisco again, even in a tablespoon of pudding topping.