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May 1
Menu: Beef Soup; Roast Beef; Noodles; Yorkshire Pudding; Browned Potatoes; Canned Corn Pudding; Spinach and Egg Salad; Strawberry Sherbet; Coffee Canned Corn Pudding-1 can corn, 1 cup hot milk, 1/4 teaspoon salt, 1/2 teaspoon sugar, 1 tablespoon Crisco, 1 tablespoon flour, and 1 egg. Melt Crisco; mix well with flour; add the milk gradually, then the seasoning and corn, and last of all beaten egg. Pour into Criscoed baking dish and bake in moderate oven for 1½ hour.
A plain custard-thickened corn pudding from the promotional cookbook Procter & Gamble issued to teach cooks what to do with its new shortening. The proportions are sound; only the can size and the baking time need translating.
- "1 can corn"Period canned corn was commonly sold in what later became the No. 2 size, very roughly 2 cups of drained kernels, though can sizes were not yet standardised. A modern 15-oz can gives about 1½ cups, so one can plus about half a cup of thawed frozen corn is close.
- Moderate ovenConventionally read as about 350F. The recipe itself gives no temperature, only the term.
- The time is the weak pointAn hour and a half at 350F will overcook a pudding built on one egg and a cup of milk; the custard weeps and the top goes leathery. Check at 40 minutes and pull it when the centre is just set with a slight wobble.
- CriscoAny solid vegetable shortening works, and butter is better tasting here. "Criscoed baking dish" simply means greased.
- It is a roux, not a batterMelt the fat, stir in the flour, and cook it a moment before the milk goes in gradually, or the pudding tastes of raw flour. Add the beaten egg only after the mixture has stopped steaming hard, or it scrambles.
- Water bathSetting the dish in a pan of hot water gives a smoother set and protects the edges, though the recipe does not call for one.
- YieldAbout 4 side-dish servings in a 1-quart dish. The half teaspoon of sugar is there to lift the canned corn, not to sweeten it; taste and adjust if your corn is already sweet.
The Story of Crisco (1913) was written by Marion Harris Neil, cookery editor of the Ladies' Home Journal, for Procter & Gamble, which had launched the hydrogenated cottonseed shortening in 1911 and needed to persuade cooks to abandon lard and butter. The "Calendar of Dinners" section assigned a full menu to every day of the year; this one is dated May 2. Corn pudding itself is much older than the shortening, a long-standing American dish of maize bound with milk and egg and baked, and the canned version shows how thoroughly commercial tinned vegetables had entered ordinary cooking by the 1910s. Here the fat makes the white sauce, and it also greases the dish.