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June 23
Menu: Soup with Marrow Balls; Sweetbread Patties; Saratoga Chips; Green Peas; Beet Salad; Raspberry Batter Pudding; Coffee Raspberry Batter Pudding-1 pint milk, 2 eggs, 4 tablespoons flour, salt, and melted Crisco. Put flour and good pinch of salt into a basin, make a well in center, break in eggs, stir, gradually mixing in flour from sides, and add milk by degrees until a thick, smooth batter is formed. Now beat well 10 minutes, add remainder of milk; cover, and let stand for at least 1 hour. When ready to use, put 1 tablespoon melted Crisco into pudding dish, and while it is heating give batter another good beating. Pour into dish, and bake in quick oven for 35 minutes. Serve with raspberries and sugar.
A plain English batter pudding of the Yorkshire type, baked in hot fat and served with fruit. Two things decide whether it rises: the rest and the heat of the greased dish.
- "Quick oven"In the cookery of the period this is usually read as roughly 400-450F. A batter pudding relies on a strong initial heat to turn the milk's water to steam and inflate the structure; a moderate oven is likely to give a denser, flatter result.
- The dish must be smokingPut the greased pudding dish into the hot oven and leave it until the fat shimmers before the batter goes in. This is the hinge of the recipe. Batter poured into a merely warm dish will not lift.
- CriscoCrisco is vegetable shortening, launched shortly before this book and called for throughout it. Any neutral solid shortening, or an equal amount of oil, does the same job for greasing the dish. Crisco has been reformulated since 1913 and the fat in a modern tin is not the same as the original.
- Milk, added in two stagesThe pint is split: enough at first to make a thick, smooth batter that can be beaten without lumps, the rest stirred in afterward to thin it. Follow that order or you will fight lumps.
- Ten minutes of beatingA few minutes with an electric mixer will do much of the same work of smoothing and aerating the batter. The hour of resting afterward matters at least as much, and longer does no harm; refrigerate if it will stand more than about two hours.
- Quantities that are left vagueThe melted Crisco is unmeasured in the ingredient list; the only quantity given is the tablespoon used to grease the dish. "Good pinch of salt" is roughly 1/4 teaspoon.
- Dish size and yieldA pint of milk with two eggs and four tablespoons of flour is a thin batter. Use a shallow dish of about 8 by 10 inches so it spreads no more than half an inch deep. Serves four.
- The raspberriesThey go nowhere near the oven. Crush or macerate them with sugar and spoon them over the pudding as it comes out, while it is still puffed.
- The heading"June 24, June 26" and the stray "Coffee" appear to be carried over from a menu listing, where the pudding is given as one course of a suggested dinner rather than a standalone dish.
The Story of Crisco (1913), written by Marion Harris Neil for Procter & Gamble, was published two years after Crisco itself went on sale and is one of the more successful pieces of cookbook advertising ever produced: several hundred recipes, every one of them calling for the new hydrogenated cottonseed-oil shortening in place of butter or lard. This pudding is an old English form with a new fat dropped into it. Batter puddings of milk, eggs and flour baked in hot dripping are documented in English cookery from the eighteenth century onward, the best known being the one that took the name of Yorkshire; served sweet with sugar and whatever fruit was ripe, they were a cheap way to end a meal. Printed menus of this kind were a common device of the period, sparing the housekeeper the work of planning. Late June is when raspberries would have been coming in.