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June 7
Menu: Boiled Salmon, Egg Sauce; Creamed Potatoes; Cheese; Dressed Lettuce; New Peas; Crackers; Chocolate Bread Pudding; Coffee Chocolate Bread Pudding-3/4 cup breadcrumbs, 2 cups scalded milk, 3 squares melted chocolate, 2 eggs, 1 tablespoon Crisco, salt to taste, 1/2 teaspoon vanilla, 1/4 cup cold milk, 3/4 cup sugar and 1/2 cup Sultana raisins. Mix all ingredients in order given. Pour into a Criscoed baking dish, set into pan of hot water, and bake 1 hour in moderate oven; stir twice during baking to keep chocolate from rising to the top.
A baked custard pudding thickened with breadcrumbs, from the recipe calendar that fills the back of the Crisco book. The stray line at the end ("June 8 Veal Cutlet, Brown Gravy") is the start of the next day's menu, not part of the pudding.
- Moderate oven350F. In a water bath the custard will not brown much, so judge by set rather than colour: it is done when the centre barely trembles and an instant-read thermometer shows about 175F.
- Squares of chocolateA square meant one ounce of unsweetened baking chocolate, so three squares is 3 oz. Substituting semisweet or bittersweet will make the pudding markedly sweeter than intended against the 3/4 cup of sugar.
- CriscoCrisco in 1913 was hydrogenated cottonseed oil, sold as a replacement for lard and butter. One tablespoon of any neutral solid shortening, or butter, does the same job here; "a Criscoed baking dish" simply means greased.
- The stirring instructionThis is the hinge. Melted chocolate is lighter than the milk custard and will float to the surface as it sets, leaving a bitter crust over a pale pudding. Stir gently at roughly 20 and 40 minutes, before the eggs have set, and stop after that.
- Scalded milk and the eggsScald the 2 cups of milk and pour it over the crumbs to let them swell. The recipe's own order then adds the chocolate and eggs, with the 1/4 cup cold milk after; if the mixture is still hot, bringing the cold milk in with the eggs helps guard against curdling.
- SultanasSultana raisins are golden raisins, seedless and from the white sultana grape. Ordinary dark raisins work but read as heavier against the chocolate.
- BreadcrumbsSoft crumbs torn or grated from stale bread, not dried fine crumbs from a canister. Dry commercial crumbs absorb far more liquid and give a pasty pudding.
- Water bath and yieldA 1 1/2-quart dish suits the volume; pour boiling water halfway up its sides. Enough for about six, served warm. Cream or a plain hard sauce would suit, though the recipe specifies no accompaniment.
The Story of Crisco was published by Procter & Gamble in 1913, two years after Crisco itself went on sale, and the recipes were compiled by Marion Harris Neil, described as cookery editor of the Ladies' Home Journal. The book's job was to teach cooks that a solid white vegetable fat could stand in for lard and butter everywhere they already used them, which is why Crisco turns up in a tablespoon quantity here, in a pudding that scarcely needs fat at all. The dish itself is much older than the shortening: baked bread pudding was a standard English and American use for stale loaf ends, and chocolate and raisins lift a thrift pudding towards a company dessert. Its placement in a dated calendar of dinners reflects the era's enthusiasm for planned menus.