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July 9
Menu: Sardines and Lemon; Olives; Radishes; Cold Roast of Lamb, Mint Sauce; Creamed Potatoes; Endive and Cheese Salad; Cherry Souffle; Iced Tea; Peas; Put Crisco and flour in saucepan,; mix over fire, add milk, stir till it boils; and becomes thick; remove from fire; to cool 10 minutes, add sugar, yolks; eggs, 1 by 1 stirring each thoroughly,; whites stiffly beaten up, then add; chopped cherries. Pour all into; Criscoed souffle mold. Put into; saucepan with ½ an inch of boiling; water. Put lid on saucepan and; steam gently 3/4 hour. Turn out, send; to table with jam sauce round.
This is a steamed cherry soufflé pudding built on a thick white panada, printed as part of a day-by-day dinner calendar. The heading "Peas" belongs to another dish on the same page of the calendar; the instructions here are unmistakably for the sweet course.
- No quantities are givenThe calendar entries were written as reminders, not as standalone recipes, and this one lists no amounts at all. A period steamed soufflé of this size runs roughly 2 tablespoons fat, 2 tablespoons flour, a scant cup of milk, 2 to 3 tablespoons sugar and 3 eggs — but that is typical practice, not a figure recovered from the book. Work from a modern steamed soufflé or cabinet pudding for proportions.
- CriscoHydrogenated vegetable shortening, still sold under the same name though reformulated over the years to cut trans fats. Unsalted butter behaves better here in a sweet pudding; the book specifies Crisco because Procter & Gamble published it.
- "Criscoed" moldSimply greased. Grease the mold generously and dust it with sugar rather than flour so the pudding releases cleanly and the outside sets slightly crisp.
- Cool the base before the yolksThe ten-minute rest is the hinge. Yolks stirred into a boiling-hot panada scramble into threads, and the pudding turns granular no matter how well the whites are folded.
- Fold, do not stir, the whitesThe original says "add," but the stiff whites are the only leavening. Fold in a third to loosen the heavy base, then the rest in two additions.
- Steaming setupA half inch of boiling water in a covered saucepan, mold standing in it, over the lowest heat that keeps the water at a bare simmer. Put a folded cloth or a trivet under the mold so it is not in direct contact with the pan bottom, and top up with boiling water if the pan threatens to run dry during the 45 minutes.
- Doneness and unmoldingThe pudding should be set to the center and just firm to the touch; a skewer comes out clean. Let it stand 5 minutes off the heat before turning out, or it will slump.
- Cherries and sauceFresh sour cherries, stoned and chopped, are what a July dinner implies; drained canned or thawed frozen cherries work, patted dry so they do not weep into the batter. The "jam sauce" is jam thinned with a little water or lemon juice and warmed, poured around the base rather than over the top.
- YieldNo quantities are given, so yield can only be inferred. Made to the assumed proportions above (about 3 eggs), it would serve roughly 4 as the sweet course after a full dinner.
The Story of Crisco (1913) was written by Marion Harris Neil for Procter & Gamble, which had launched Crisco — hydrogenated cottonseed oil — in 1911 and needed to teach American cooks what to do with a fat that was neither butter nor lard. A day-by-day "Calendar of Dinners" of this kind appeared in the Crisco cookery literature (Procter & Gamble also issued a separate volume under that title), and the dated heading here belongs to that format: each entry is a compressed note to the cook rather than a full recipe, which is why a cherry pudding sits beside a heading for the vegetable course. The dish itself is an old European form, a flour-and-milk panada enriched with eggs, lightened with beaten whites and steamed in a mold in the manner of a cabinet pudding — a technique long used where a covered saucepan on the range was more dependable than a coal oven. Cherries in a July menu are presumably seasonal.