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July 12
Menu: Cottage Pie; New Stringless Beans; Olive Salad Cheese Biegnets; Apricot Pudding; Iced Coffee Apricot Pudding-Put 1 pint milk into saucepan, add two tablespoons Crisco, and bring to boiling point. Mix 1½ cup cornstarch with 1/2 cup milk and stir slowly into boiling milk, add ½ teaspoon salt. Heat 1 cup apricot jam, and strain off juice. Stir the pieces of apricot into cornstarch and cook for 5 minutes. Sprinkle 1 tablespoon chopped pistachio nuts into wet mold and pour in hot mixture. Turn out when cold and surround with apricot juice.
A cornstarch blancmange set in a mold, from the Crisco book's day-by-day dinner calendar. One measurement in the original is almost certainly a printing error, so read the first point before starting.
- The cornstarch quantity is wrongA pint of milk cannot absorb 1½ cups of cornstarch; the result would be paste, not pudding. A molded cornstarch pudding usually takes something on the order of 4 tablespoons per pint of milk, so the printed figure is best read as a misprint for a spoon measure rather than a target.
- Crisco here is just fatThe two tablespoons of shortening add richness and a little gloss; butter does the same job with better flavor. The book calls for Crisco throughout because it was published to sell it.
- ScorchingMilk brought to the boiling point in a thin pan catches on the bottom before you notice. Use a heavy saucepan, stir as it heats, and pour the cornstarch slurry in a thin stream while stirring or it will lump.
- Cook it longer than five minutes if it still tastes rawCornstarch needs a full boil to thicken and then a minute or two more to lose its chalky edge. Five minutes at a bare simmer is the minimum, not a ceiling; stir constantly, as this mixture is thick enough to catch.
- Straining the jamHeating the cup of jam loosens it enough to separate the syrup from the fruit pieces. The syrup becomes the sauce poured around the turned-out pudding; keep it aside and let it cool, or it will slump the mold.
- "Wet mold" and unmoldingRinsing the mold with cold water and leaving it damp keeps the pudding from gripping the sides. "Turn out when cold" means thoroughly chilled — three to four hours in the refrigerator, longer for a large mold.
- YieldA pint of milk makes roughly 4 servings, or 6 small ones as part of a larger dinner.
Crisco's Calendar of Dinners gave a menu for every day of the year, each one routing a familiar dish through the new vegetable shortening that Procter & Gamble had introduced in 1911 — the cookbook was frankly promotional literature, and dishes like this pudding exist mainly to show that Crisco could stand in for butter in a sweet as easily as in a pie crust. The pudding itself is a cornstarch blancmange, the great economical dessert of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: cornstarch was cheap and shelf-stable, and it set a milk pudding firmly enough to unmold and dress up with jam and nuts. The chopped pistachios sprinkled into the mold before the hot mixture goes in are a piece of period presentation logic, appearing as a green flecked crown once the pudding is turned out.