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January 29
Menu: Lobster Canapes; Cream of Oyster Soup; Olives; Celery; Crackers; Planked Shad, Roe Sauce; Duchess Potatoes; Cucumbers, French Dressing; Cabinet Pudding; Coffee Cabinet Pudding-8 stale lady fingers, 12 macaroons, 3 tablespoons cherries, currants, and citron peel chopped fine, 1 tablespoon sugar, 3 eggs, 1 pint milk, 2 teaspoons Crisco, and vanilla extract. Decorate bottom of mold with some fruit, lay row macaroons round edge of bottom. Cut ladyfingers into pieces, mix with fruit and loosely fill mold. Beat eggs with little cold milk, and 2 teaspoons Crisco, scald remainder of milk, and pour on to eggs, beating at the same time. Sweeten and flavor to taste. Gently pour this into mold. Cover with Criscoed paper and place in steamer to cook until set. This will take 34 of an hour. Let pudding stand 1 minute or 2 before turning out. Serve with custard sauce.
A steamed bread-and-butter custard dressed up with cake and candied fruit. The one thing that governs success is heat: the custard must set gently, never boil, or it will curdle and weep.
- "34 of an hour"This is a typographical casualty of the original printing: read it as 3/4 of an hour, 45 minutes. Test with a thin knife near the centre, which should come out clean, and expect the pudding to still wobble slightly.
- Steamer heatKeep the water at a bare simmer, not a rolling boil. A hard boil drives the custard above about 185F and it will scramble, however good the mixture was going in.
- Crisco and "Criscoed paper"Crisco is hydrogenated vegetable shortening, sold under the same name today though reformulated over the decades. Any neutral solid shortening or butter works; "Criscoed paper" simply means greased parchment or foil laid over the mould.
- Mould sizeThe quantities suit a 1 1/2-quart charlotte mould or pudding basin, filled loosely as instructed so the custard can seep between the cake. Grease it well and decorate the base before anything else goes in.
- Lady fingers and macaroonsLady fingers are savoiardi, the crisp Italian sponge biscuits sold for tiramisu. The macaroons meant here are small almond ones in the amaretti mould, not coconut macaroons, which behave quite differently in liquid.
- Citron peelCandied citron is still sold at Christmas and in Italian groceries; mixed candied peel is the usual stand-in. The cherries intended are candied or glacé, not fresh.
- Custard sauceThe sauce is a thin pouring custard, crème anglaise: yolks, milk, sugar and vanilla cooked to about 175F. Make it before the pudding so it has time to cool a little while the pudding steams.
- Turning out and yieldOne or two minutes' rest lets the sides pull away; much longer and the pudding sticks. Serves about four to six.
Cabinet pudding belongs to the family of British steamed puddings built on stale cake or bread — it appears in nineteenth-century English cookbooks alongside near-identical formulas called Chancellor's pudding and Newcastle pudding, and the name is generally traced to the same vein of grand-sounding kitchen titles that gave us Chancellor's and Diplomat pudding rather than to any particular cabinet. Its real logic is thrift: yesterday's lady fingers and macaroons, too dry to serve, are revived by a custard and a mould. That it turns up here in a promotional cookbook for Crisco says a good deal about the period. Procter & Gamble's hydrogenated cottonseed shortening was new, and the company's strategy was to print a full calendar of dinners in which Crisco quietly replaced butter and lard everywhere at once — even in two teaspoons stirred into a custard, where the fat does very little that butter would not have done better.