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For Pudding (Can pineapple cupful)
1 can pineapple 1 cupful breadcrumbs 1 cupful sugar 1/4 teaspoonful salt 4 tablespoonfuls melted Crisco 6 eggs Hard sauce
This page is an ingredient list rather than a full method — a common format in promotional cookbooks, where the working directions often sat in an adjacent column or a general note. Everything below assumes you will be following a standard baked or steamed crumb-pudding technique from a current source.
- No method is givenThe page supplies proportions only. Nothing here states whether the pudding is baked in a dish, steamed in a mould, or set in a water bath, or for how long. Use a modern steamed or baked breadcrumb pudding recipe for technique and take these quantities as a guide.
- "1 can pineapple"The size is not stated. A No. 2 can (roughly 20 fl oz, about 2 1/2 cups of fruit with its syrup) is a reasonable assumption for the period, though larger cans were also sold. A modern 20 oz can of crushed or sliced pineapple is a workable substitute.
- Crisco, meltedFour tablespoons of melted shortening. Any solid vegetable shortening behaves the same way; melted unsalted butter gives more flavour and slightly more moisture, since butter is about 16 percent water.
- Six eggs is the structureWith only a cupful of crumbs and no flour, the eggs are doing all the binding and lifting. This is closer to a baked custard-pudding than to a suet pudding, and it will set and brown rather than rise much.
- BreadcrumbsThe recipe does not say whether soft or dried crumbs are meant; period pudding recipes used both. Crumbs from day-old white bread will suit either reading, and are finer than panko.
- SweetnessA cup of sugar plus canned pineapple (likely packed in syrup) and hard sauce over the top is a great deal of sugar by current taste. Draining the fruit and cutting the sugar by a third is a reasonable adjustment.
- Hard sauceNot a cooked sauce: butter creamed with icing or caster sugar and flavoured with vanilla, brandy or sherry, chilled firm and served in a lump on the hot pudding so it melts. Roughly half a cup of butter to a cup of sugar.
- YieldSix eggs and a full can of fruit should roughly fill a 1 1/2 to 2 quart dish, enough for about eight, though with no method given this is only an estimate.
The Story of Crisco was written by Marion Harris Neil and published by Procter & Gamble in 1913, two years after Crisco itself went on sale. The book is advertising in the shape of a cookbook: several hundred recipes in which a hydrogenated cottonseed-oil shortening quietly replaces the butter, lard and suet that a housewife of the period might well have used, with the melted-Crisco quantity written into the ingredient list as though it had always been there. The pudding also depends on the other new convenience of the era, canned pineapple having become more widely available as Hawaiian canneries expanded over the previous decade. Canning matters more than it looks: heat processing destroys the bromelain in fresh pineapple, an enzyme that digests protein and would otherwise interfere with a pudding held together entirely by eggs. Hard sauce, the accompaniment named at the end, is an older English survival, generally traced to the brandy butter served with Christmas pudding.