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March 8
Menu: Parsnips; Mashed Potatoes; Russian Salad; Cheese; Crackers; Bird's Nest Pudding Coffee Bird's Nest Pudding-3 eggs, 3/4 cup flour, 6 tablespoons Crisco, 1½ cup sugar, 1/2 cup blanc-mange, pinch baking powder, pistachio nuts or cocoanut, angelica and apricot jam. Break eggs into basin, add sugar to them, and beat over saucepan of hot water until mixture is consistency of thick cream. Melt Crisco; sieve flour and baking powder together. Stir Crisco and flour quickly and lightly into egg mixture, turn into well-criscoed mold, and bake in a moderate oven for 15 to 20 minutes. Turn out when done, and let the cake get cold. Rub some apricot jam through a hair sieve, put a thin layer of this over the cake, roll it either in chopped pistachio nuts or desiccated cocoanut. Stand on a dish. Have ready some blanc-mange eggs, fill the center with these, and arrange round the base of the nest some pieces of angelica to represent twigs. It is now ready to serve. The blanc-mange eggs are made by either filling some egg-molds with blanc-mange, or by emptying out some eggs, and using the shells. The eggs must be emptied through as small a hole as possible. When set, the shells are broken away carefully.
The dish here is a whisked sponge (a genoise in all but name) shaped into a nest and filled with molded blanc-mange eggs. The cake itself takes about twenty minutes; the assembly is the work.
- The hinge: the egg foamBeat eggs and sugar over hot — not boiling — water until the mixture ribbons and holds a trail, then fold in the sieved flour and the melted fat quickly and with as few strokes as possible. There is no chemical leavening worth speaking of here, so the whole rise is in that foam; melted fat deflates it fast, which is why the original says "quickly and lightly."
- CriscoCrisco in 1913 was the newly introduced hydrogenated cottonseed shortening, and the book exists to sell it. Any neutral solid shortening works; melted unsalted butter gives a better flavor in a sponge this plain. "Well-criscoed mold" means grease it thoroughly with the shortening.
- Moderate ovenRoughly 350-375F. Fifteen to twenty minutes suits a shallow ring or bowl-shaped mold; the cake is done when it springs back and pulls slightly from the sides.
- The sugar looks wrongThree-quarters cup flour to a cup and a half of sugar is far more sugar than a whisked sponge of this kind normally carries, and a batter that sweet is likely to be slack and to hold air poorly. Something nearer equal measures - about three-quarters cup sugar to three eggs - fits the method as written. Treat the printed figure as suspect.
- Blanc-mangeA cornstarch-and-milk pudding, stiff enough to unmold — not the almond-milk jelly of earlier centuries. The half cup called for must be made separately; the book gives no formula on this page. It has to be set firm or the eggs will slump in the nest.
- Angelica and the nestAngelica is the candied green stem of Angelica archangelica, sold in strips by confectioners and still findable from baking suppliers; thin strips of candied citron peel or green-tinted candied stem stand in. A "hair sieve" is simply a fine mesh strainer — warm the jam slightly and it will pass through easily.
- The eggshell moldsFilling emptied raw shells with blanc-mange puts food against an unwashed shell interior, and shells can carry Salmonella, so there is a real if modest risk. Use egg-shaped candy or ice molds instead; the result is much the same and the shells add nothing but novelty.
- YieldProbably six to eight small servings. It is a centerpiece dessert, cut at the table, and it is best assembled within a few hours of serving - the jam softens the coconut coating if it stands overnight.
In American cookbooks "bird's nest pudding" usually meant something quite different: whole cored apples set in a dish, filled with sugar and buried in custard or batter, a New England standard through the nineteenth century. This version reads as a confectioner's take on the name - a sponge coated in sieved apricot jam and rolled in chopped pistachio or desiccated coconut, filled with molded pudding eggs and finished with candied angelica. Its place in the book's calendar, dated the ninth of March, falls in the weeks before Easter, when egg-shaped desserts earned their keep. The Story of Crisco was published by Procter & Gamble in 1913, two years after the product was introduced in 1911, and recipes like this one served to show that the new hydrogenated shortening could handle fine pastry work and not merely frying - a claim that mattered when cooks had to be persuaded away from butter and lard.