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March 13
Menu: Baked Stuffed Haddock; Julienne Potatoes, Creamed Cucumbers; Egg Salad; Steamed Graham Pudding, Hard Sauce; Coffee Steamed Graham Pudding-1/2 cup molasses, 1½ cup milk, 1 egg, 1/4 cup Crisco, 1/2 cups graham flour, 1/2 teaspoon soda, 1 teaspoon salt, 1 cup stoned and chopped dates. Melt Crisco, add molasses, milk, egg well beaten, dry ingredients, mixed and sifted, and dates; turn into Criscoed mold, cover, and steam 2½ hours. Serve with hard sauce. Figs cut in small pieces may be used in place of dates.
A plain steamed molasses pudding from Crisco's 1913 promotional cookbook, printed here as part of a day's menu rather than as a standalone recipe. The transcription has suffered: at least one quantity is clearly mangled.
- The flour quantity is wrong as printed"1/2 cups graham flour" cannot be right against 1½ cups milk and half a cup of molasses. The figure was most likely 2½ cups. Treat the printed number as a typesetting error rather than a measurement.
- Graham flourCoarse whole-wheat flour, milled with the bran and germ left in. Modern stone-ground whole-wheat is the closest match; regular whole-wheat flour works but gives a finer, denser crumb.
- Soda, not baking powderHalf a teaspoon of soda is there to react with the acid in the molasses, and it is the main leavening in the pudding, helped a little by the beaten egg. Molasses acidity varies, so the rise will be modest.
- A teaspoon of salt is a lotFor a sweet pudding of this size, half a teaspoon is nearer modern taste.
- CriscoThe book exists to sell it. Any solid vegetable shortening behaves the same way; melted butter also works and tastes better, though it firms up more in the cold pudding. "Criscoed mold" simply means well greased.
- Steaming, not bakingFill a covered mold no more than two-thirds full, set it on a rack in a deep pot, and add boiling water to come halfway up the sides. Keep it at a bare simmer and top up with boiling water as it evaporates; the pot must never run dry.
- Two and a half hours is realSteamed puddings need the full time to set the starch through a dense, wet batter. A skewer should come out clean and the pudding pull slightly from the mold. Undercooking gives a gummy center that no extra resting will fix.
- Hard sauceButter creamed with powdered sugar and a flavoring — vanilla, brandy or nutmeg — chilled firm and spooned onto the hot pudding so it melts. Not cooked.
- YieldEnough batter for a mold of roughly 1½ to 2 quarts, serving six to eight. Leftovers reheat well by re-steaming for twenty minutes.
The Story of Crisco (1913) was published by Procter & Gamble two years after the launch of the first mass-market hydrogenated vegetable shortening, and its "Calendar of Dinners" laid out a full year of menus in which Crisco quietly replaced lard and butter in every recipe. Steamed puddings were an obvious showcase: they had been standard English and American cold-weather fare for generations, they demanded a solid fat, and they suited a period kitchen where a stovetop pot was cheaper to run than a hot oven. Graham flour carries its own history — named for Sylvester Graham, the 1830s dietary reformer who preached unbolted wheat — and by 1913 it had drifted from moral crusade into an ordinary pantry staple valued simply for flavor and roughage. The dates would have been imported, most likely from North Africa or the Persian Gulf, and their appearance in a mid-March weekday menu says something about how far the American grocery trade had reached by then.