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July 1
Menu: Boned Chicken; Stuffed Pepper Salad; Sliced Tomatoes; White and Brown Bread; Ground Rice Pudding; Coffee Jelly; Fruit Ground Rice Pudding-1/2 cup ground rice, 3 cups milk, 3 eggs, 4 tablespoons sugar, rind ½ lemon, 2 tablespoons Crisco, 1/4 cup Sultana raisins, and brown breadcrumbs. Boil milk slowly, sprinkle in ground rice, boil 6 minutes. Remove add sugar and Crisco. Mix well, cool a little, add eggs well beaten, stir and flavor with grated lemon rind. Crisco plain mold, dust with toasted breadcrumbs. Pour in pudding. Bake 1 hour in moderate oven. Serve with following sauce: 1 small lemon, 1 cup water, 1 teaspoon cornstarch, 1 tablespoon sugar, and few drops red color. Put cornstarch into pan with lemon juice, add other ingredients and bring to boil.
A baked rice-flour custard in the English nursery mold tradition, adapted to sell shortening. The method is sound but leaves out a step or two that a 1913 cook would have supplied herself.
- Ground riceThis is rice flour rather than cracked or coarse rice; the fine white rice flour sold in Asian and South Asian groceries is a close substitute, though period ground rice was often a slightly coarser grind. Sprinkle it into the milk in a thin stream while whisking or it will lump on contact.
- The raisins are orphanedSultanas appear in the ingredient list and never again in the method. Fold them in after the eggs, just before the mixture goes into the mold, or they will sink and scorch on the base.
- Temper the eggs"Cool a little" is the hinge. The rice mixture comes off the heat near boiling; pour a ladleful into the beaten eggs first, then return everything to the pan. Straight in, you get sweet scrambled egg.
- Moderate ovenConventionally around 350F. A plain charlotte or pudding mold large enough to hold the mixture with room to spare, set in a roasting pan with an inch of hot water, gives a smoother set than dry heat; the custard is done when a knife an inch from the center comes out clean, which may be before the full hour.
- "Crisco plain mold"Grease the mold with shortening and then dust it with the toasted brown breadcrumbs, which form a crust and release the pudding. Let it stand ten minutes before turning out.
- Lemon rindZest only, the yellow layer; the white pith under it is bitter and the flavor of the whole pudding rests on this one ingredient.
- The sauceOne teaspoon of cornstarch to a cup of water gives a thin pouring sauce, which is what is wanted. The "few drops red color" is cosmetic only — cochineal or a synthetic red dye, both in use at the time — and can simply be left out.
- YieldServes four to six. Good warm; it firms considerably in the refrigerator and slices cleanly cold.
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 — a cookbook that is also a long argument for a new product, hydrogenated cottonseed oil sold as a cleaner, cheaper stand-in for butter and lard. Its "Calendar of Dinners" assigns a full menu to every day of the year, which is why this pudding is stamped July 2; the format spared the housekeeper the daily decision and spared the company the trouble of persuading her twice. The dish itself is older than the shortening in it: baked ground-rice puddings set in a crumbed mold were standard English nursery and invalid cookery through the nineteenth century, usually enriched with butter. Substituting two tablespoons of Crisco for that butter is the entire point of the recipe's inclusion.