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June 27
Menu: Boiled Salmon, Egg Sauce; Boiled Potatoes; Cucumber Salad; Almond Pudding; Coffee; arrange; Peas; Meringues Almond Pudding-Beat separately yolks of 2 eggs and whites of 3, and mix to a cream with 4 tablespoons ground almonds, 4 tablespoons sugar, and 4 tablespoons Crisco. Mix in a wineglass of sherry, and pour into a Criscoed mold ornamented with nuts. Bake it, and serve hot.
A small baked almond custard-cake, printed as a dated side note in the book's day-by-day dinner calendar rather than as a full recipe. It gives no oven temperature, no baking time and no pan size, so a few decisions are left to the cook.
- A wineglassIn American cookbooks of this period a wineglass is reckoned at about 2 fluid ounces, a quarter cup. That is a considerable amount of sherry in a mixture this small, and it will keep the batter loose.
- CriscoCrisco is hydrogenated vegetable shortening, still sold today, though reformulated since 1913; it fills much the same role in baking. Four tablespoons of softened butter behaves similarly here, with more flavour; the book naturally never suggests it.
- "Criscoed mold"Grease the mould heavily with shortening, then press the nuts into the greased surface so they stay put when the batter goes in. They end up on top when the pudding is turned out.
- Ground almondsWhat is sold today as almond flour or almond meal. There is no flour, crumb or starch in the mixture at all, so the eggs and almonds are the entire structure.
- The ovenUnstated; the recipe says only 'Bake it.' A modern cook will do best around 350F for a shallow mould, lower, nearer 325F, for a deep one. Egg-and-almond mixtures with this much liquid tend to curdle and weep if pushed hot.
- DonenessJudge it by set rather than clock: the centre should barely tremble and a skewer come out clean. Expect somewhere in the region of 30 to 40 minutes for a small mould, longer for a deep one.
- The egg countTwo yolks and three whites, as printed. The extra white lightens a mixture that is otherwise mostly fat, sugar and nuts. Beating the whites separately and folding them in last will give more rise than a straight 'mix to a cream', though that is a departure from the instruction as written.
- YieldTwelve tablespoons of solids with two yolks and three whites makes a modest pudding, enough for three or four as written, served hot straight from the mould.
The Story of Crisco (1913) was written by Marion Harris Neil for Procter and Gamble, which had introduced Crisco two years earlier as an all-vegetable substitute for lard and butter, and much of the book exists to prove that the new fat could be dropped into any established dish. Almond pudding is one of those established dishes: baked puddings of ground almonds, eggs, sugar and sack or sherry appear in English receipt books for centuries before this, and this version is essentially that old formula with shortening standing in for butter. The "Calendar of Dinners" that houses it assigned a menu to each day of the year, a common device in early twentieth-century domestic manuals aimed at the housekeeper who had to answer the question of what to cook rather than how. The heading on this page reads Meringues, which may well be a leftover from a neighbouring entry; the dated note is what belongs to June 28.