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October 24
Menu: Roast Pork, Apple Sauce; Browned Parsnips; Glazed Sweet Potatoes Porcupine Salad; Black Cap Pudding Coffee Black Cap Pudding-Mix 1/4 cup currants, with 3 tablespoons sugar, 1½ teaspoon salt, 11/4 cups flour sifted with 1 teaspoon baking powder, 1/2 teaspoon grated nutmeg, 2 tablespoons Crisco, 2 well beaten eggs, and 2 cupfuls milk, and beat well together. Crisco a pudding mold, sprinkle in some currants, pour in mixture, cover with greased paper and steam for 2 hours. Serve with milk.
A steamed English batter pudding, printed here as part of Crisco's day-by-day dinner calendar. The text has some obvious typesetting damage that needs sorting out before you start.
- Reading the amounts"11/4 cups flour" means 1¼ cups. The salt was checked against the printed page and reads ½ teaspoon, as given here.
- The batter is meant to be thinTwo cups of milk to 1¼ cups flour gives something close to pancake batter, not a cake dough. That is correct for a batter pudding; it sets into a soft, custardy crumb rather than rising like a sponge.
- "Crisco a pudding mold" means grease itThe book uses its own product as a verb. Any solid shortening or butter works. Grease generously — steamed puddings stick, and the currants pressed against the metal stick worst.
- Where the black cap comes fromThe currants sprinkled into the greased mold sit at what becomes the top once the pudding is turned out. Press them into the fat so they stay put when the batter goes in, or they float loose and you lose the cap.
- Steaming setupUse a 1½–2 quart mold or pudding basin filled no more than two-thirds. Cover with greased paper, then foil or a cloth tied down, and stand it on a rack in a covered pot with water reaching halfway up. Keep the water at a bare simmer and top it up with boiling water as it drops.
- Two hours is realSteamed batter puddings genuinely need the time at low, moist heat; the centre is set when a skewer comes out clean. Rushing at a hard boil makes the outside tough before the middle cooks.
- Yield and servingProbably about six servings. "Serve with milk" means cold milk or thin cream poured over at the table; a sweet hard sauce or warm custard is the dressier option.
- Currants, not raisinsDried Zante currants are meant — small, sharp and dark. Modern raisins are larger and sweeter and will sink through the thin batter rather than staying in a neat cap.
Black cap pudding belongs to the large English family of steamed batter puddings that were standard nursery and everyday fare through the nineteenth century, and it takes its name from the simple trick of lining the bottom of the mold with dried currants so that the turned-out pudding wears a dark cap. Recipes under that name appear in British household books well before this one, and its presence in an American promotional cookbook shows how thoroughly such puddings had crossed over into ordinary US home cooking. The Story of Crisco was published by Procter & Gamble in 1913 to teach cooks what to do with a wholly new product — hydrogenated cottonseed oil, sold as a substitute for both butter and lard. The dated day-by-day entry points to Procter & Gamble's Calendar of Dinners arrangement, which was issued in more than one form and assigned a full menu to every day of the year. Here the shortening does very little of the work, but the grease in the mold gave the company another mention on the page.