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July 16
Menu: Tomato Soup; Fried Chicken Waffles Pea Souffles; Creamed White Potatoes; Snow Balls; Bean Salad; Coffee Snow Balls-1 cup sugar, 1½ cup milk, 1/2 cup Crisco, 2½ cups flour, 31½ teaspoons baking powder, and whites of 4 eggs. Cream Crisco, add sugar gradually, milk, and flour sifted with baking powder; add whites of eggs beaten stiff. Steam 35 minutes in Criscoed cups; serve with stewed or preserved fruit.
A steamed white pudding from Crisco's day-by-day dinner calendar, baked in nothing — it goes into greased cups and over water. The leavening figure in the original has not survived intact.
- Baking powderThe printed page reads 3½ teaspoons of baking powder to 2¼ cups of flour, which is what our text now gives. That is on the generous side; 2½ to 3 teaspoons will raise these steamed puddings well enough if you prefer a less pronounced lift.
- CriscoStill sold, and still the same idea: a solid vegetable shortening, now with far less trans fat than the 1913 formula. Any solid all-vegetable shortening works, and the pudding will also take unsalted butter, which browns the crumb slightly and adds flavour the shortening does not.
- "Criscoed cups"Means greased individual moulds — teacups, custard cups or dariole moulds of about 6 oz. Grease them well and fill only two-thirds full; steamed batter climbs. Cover each with a scrap of buttered parchment or foil so condensation does not soak the tops.
- Steaming setupStand the cups on a rack in a deep pot with an inch or two of simmering water, lid on, water topped up from the kettle as it boils away. The water must never reach a hard boil, which knocks the cups about and coarsens the crumb.
- TimingThirty-five minutes is right for cups of this size; a skewer should come out clean and the pudding should spring back. Larger moulds need proportionally longer, and unlike a baked cake these are forgiving of a few extra minutes.
- Whites onlyFour whites and no yolks presumably accounts for the name — the crumb steams to a pale, almost white dome. Fold the stiff whites in with a light hand at the very end; beating them into the batter defeats the whole point.
- Yield and servingAbout eight to ten cup-sized puddings. Turn them out hot and spoon stewed rhubarb, plums or apricots, or a loose preserve, around the base. The pudding itself is only lightly sweet and depends on the fruit.
Steamed puddings in individual cups were a staple of American household cookery well into the twentieth century, and a page like this one shows why: the batter is plain, and the moulds are whatever china is in the cupboard. The Story of Crisco (1913) was published by Procter & Gamble to introduce a wholly new product, hydrogenated cottonseed oil, into recipes that cooks already recognised, so its dishes are deliberately conventional; the innovation is the fat, not the dish. "Snow balls" seems to have been a loose name applied to small, white, domed sweets of various kinds, so the label probably describes the look rather than a fixed formula.