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For Pudding (Lbs cooked fish cupful milk)
2 lbs. cooked fish 1 cupful milk 1 tablespoonful flour 1 tablespoonful Crisco 2 eggs
This is the ingredient list for a baked fish pudding, printed without its method — the proportions are the useful part, and they follow a standard pattern any cook of the period would have recognized.
- The hinge: it is a panada, not a batterThe hinge: a panada, not a batter -- The flour, fat and milk were almost certainly meant to be cooked together into a thick white sauce, cooled, then beaten with the flaked fish and eggs; that was the standard method for such puddings, though this page gives no directions. Stirring raw flour into milk and fish tends to give a pasty, separated pudding.
- CriscoIntroduced in 1911 as hydrogenated cottonseed oil; today's product is a soybean/palm blend, reformulated in the mid-2000s to cut trans fats. A tablespoon of butter behaves much the same way here and tastes better with fish.
- Cupful and tablespoonfulA cupful is 8 fl oz. Some books of this period intended rounded rather than level spoonfuls, so the tablespoon of flour and of fat may be worth reading generously — the sauce should be very thick.
- Two pounds of cooked fishThat is the yield of roughly 2½–3 lb of raw fillets, or the remains of a good-sized boiled cod or haddock. Any firm white fish works; oily fish such as salmon makes a heavier, stronger pudding.
- Bones and seasoningThe list omits both. Flake the fish and go through it by hand for bones and skin, and season assertively — salt, white pepper, a little lemon or nutmeg — since fish and milk together are bland.
- BakingButter a mold or loaf pan, fill it, and set it in a pan of hot water. The page gives no oven directions; a moderate oven of about 350F for 45–60 minutes suits a pudding of this size, and it is done when the center is set and a knife comes out clean.
- YieldTwo pounds of fish plus the sauce fills about a 1½-quart mold and serves six to eight, hot with an egg or parsley sauce, or cold in slices.
The Story of Crisco (Procter & Gamble, 1913) paired a promotional account of the new hydrogenated shortening with several hundred recipes credited to Marion Harris Neil, described on the book's title page as a former cookery editor of Ladies' Home Journal — the aim being to show that a single tin could replace butter, lard and suet across the whole of a household's cooking, fish puddings included. The dish itself belongs to an older tradition: baked puddings and timbales of pounded or flaked fish bound with a milk-and-flour panada and eggs were standard in nineteenth-century English and American kitchens, and remain a fixture of Scandinavian cooking as fiskepudding. Their real function was economy. A large boiled fish rarely finished in one sitting, and a pudding turned the remainder into a second, respectable dinner rather than scraps.