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July 26
Menu: Vegetarian; Cream of Green Peas; Bean Loaf with Rice; Stewed Corn; Tomato and Lettuce Salad; Peach Pudding; Coffee Peach Pudding-Fill Criscoed baking dish full of peaches and pour over top a batter made of 1 tablespoon Crisco, 1/2 cup sugar, 1 cup flour, 1 teaspoon baking powder, 1 well beaten egg, 1/2 teaspoon salt, and 1 cup milk. Bake in moderate oven 30 minutes. Serve with cream.
A cobbler in all but name: fruit on the bottom, a thin pourable batter on top. The proportions are sound, but the vessel and the baking time need attention.
- "Moderate oven"350F. The batter needs to set and brown without the peach juices boiling over, so resist the urge to go hotter.
- Criscoed dishSimply grease the baking dish with solid vegetable shortening. Any neutral fat or butter does the same job; the instruction is a house style of the book, not a technique.
- Dish sizeThe batter is built on one cup of flour, so use a 1 1/2 to 2 quart dish, roughly an 8-inch square. A dish "full of peaches" in anything larger leaves the topping too thin to set into a proper crust.
- The tablespoon of CriscoMelt it and beat it into the milk and egg rather than trying to cream so small an amount into the sugar. The batter should pour freely, like a thick pancake batter.
- TimingThirty minutes is optimistic for a dish packed with juicy fruit. Expect 40 to 50 minutes, and judge by a skewer coming clean from the batter layer and juices bubbling at the edges.
- The peachesPeeled and sliced. Freestone fruit is easier to prepare, though early-season peaches may well be clingstone. Firm-ripe fruit holds its shape; very soft fruit collapses into syrup and waterlogs the batter from below. A tablespoon of sugar tossed with sharp fruit is not amiss.
- Serve with creamUnwhipped pouring cream, cold over the hot pudding. Cream of this period was often thinner than modern heavy cream, so light cream or half-and-half is at least as close a match.
- YieldSix modest servings from an 8-inch dish. It is at its best warm, within an hour of coming out of the oven.
The Story of Crisco (1913) was published by Procter & Gamble to teach American cooks what to do with hydrogenated cottonseed oil, a product with no culinary tradition behind it. The book's "Calendar of Dinners" assigns a menu to each day of the year, and a peach pudding on July 27 places it squarely in the height of the Eastern peach harvest. The dish itself is much older than the shortening in it: a batter poured over fruit and baked is one of the standard forms of the Anglo-American fruit pudding, close kin to the cobbler. What Crisco offered here was less flavor than argument, the company's pitch being that its product was cleaner than lard, more economical than butter, and neither animal nor quick to spoil in a warm kitchen.