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June 26
Menu: Puree of Peas; Baked Red Snapper, Tomato Sauce; Riced Potatoes Buttered Beets; Cabbage Salad; Cup Puddings; Coffee Cup Puddings-These should be baked in little cups or molds. For 1 pudding, take 1 tablespoon of following ingredients: flour, Crisco, milk, currants, sugar. For 3 puddings use treble quantities. Put flour into a basin with a pinch of salt, together with currants and sugar; melt Crisco to pour in, add milk, and mix well together. Put into Criscoed cups and bake in a moderate oven for a 14 of an hour. Tops should be nicely browned when done. These puddings are nice either hot or cold.
A single-serving pudding scaled by the tablespoon, from the recipe pages that accompany the dated menus in this book. It is simple enough that the few details that matter, matter a lot.
- The proportionsOne tablespoon each of flour, Crisco, milk, currants and sugar makes one small pudding, baked in little cups or moulds; the recipe does not specify their size. Three puddings means three tablespoons of each. For six people, work in multiples rather than trying to convert to cups.
- Oven temperatureThe recipe gives no temperature; "a moderate oven" in books of this period is usually read as somewhere in the region of 350-375F. "A 1/4 of an hour" is 15 minutes, which suits puddings this small, and the recipe itself tells you to judge by the tops being nicely browned rather than by the clock.
- CriscoAny solid vegetable shortening stands in directly. Melt it and let it cool slightly before it meets the milk, or it will seize into lumps in the batter.
- CurrantsThese are dried Zante currants, the small black raisin, not fresh red or black currants. Toss them through the flour before the liquid goes in so they stay suspended instead of sinking.
- No leavening, no eggThere is neither baking powder nor egg here, so expect a close, moist, scone-like crumb rather than a risen sponge. Mixing thoroughly but briefly gives the best texture; long beating toughens it.
- "Criscoed cups"Grease the cups generously and, if they are ceramic or metal, dust with flour as well. Run a knife round the rim and turn them out while still warm if you want them unmoulded.
- ServingOne pudding per person. Hot, they take a spoonful of custard or cream well; cold, they eat like a small cake.
The Story of Crisco was published by Procter & Gamble in 1913, two years after Crisco itself went on sale as the first widely marketed hydrogenated vegetable shortening, and the recipes were compiled by Marion Harris Neil, then cookery editor of the Ladies' Home Journal. The book's "Calendar of Dinners" gives a dated menu for every day of the year with supporting recipes attached, which is why this one carries a June date and sits under a heading for coffee. The dish itself is older than the shortening: small cup or mould puddings of flour, fat, sugar, milk and dried currants are generally thought of as a fixture of British and American nursery cookery, cheap, quickly baked, and traditionally made with suet or butter. Substituting Crisco for those animal fats is precisely the point the book was published to make.</p>