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November 18
Menu: Julienne Soup; Stuffed Hearts; Browned Potatoes; Toast Points; Pickles; Baked Squash; Almond and Apple Pudding; Coffee Almond and Apple Pudding-Pare and core 6 apples, chop into small pieces and sprinkle with 1/2 cup sugar. Have ready 2 cups breadcrumbs, soaked in 1/2 cup milk to which 1 tablespoon melted Crisco has been added. Beat 2 eggs till light, add to them grating of nutmeg, a pinch of cinnamon and good pinch of salt. Mix apple with soaked breadcrumbs, then eggs, and lastly 2 dozens blanched almonds chopped fine. Thin with 1/2 cup milk, then pour into Criscoed tin and bake. Serve with sweetened cream.
A bread-and-butter pudding in all but name, with apples standing in for dried fruit. The original gives no oven temperature or time, which is typical of the book's calendar section.
- Oven and timingBake at 350F. A pudding this size in a buttered 8-inch square or 2-quart dish takes 45 to 60 minutes, until the centre is set and a knife comes out clean.
- Criscoed tinThis simply means a tin greased with shortening. Any neutral fat or butter does the same job; the instruction is advertising as much as method.
- Crisco itselfThe 1 tablespoon of melted shortening in the milk is there to enrich the crumbs. Melted butter is the natural modern substitute and adds flavour the original lacked by design.
- BreadcrumbsSoft fresh crumbs from a day-old loaf, not dry packaged crumbs, which will drink the milk and turn pasty. Two cups of soft crumbs is roughly four slices with crusts removed.
- ApplesFigure about 2 pounds in total, or four large modern apples. A firm cooking variety holds its shape better than a soft eating apple.
- AlmondsTwo dozen blanched almonds is roughly a scant 1/4 cup once chopped fine. Buying them already blanched saves the scald-and-slip step entirely.
- The milk in two stagesHalf a cup soaks the crumbs, and the second half cup thins the finished mixture. It should pour, not mound. Add the second measure gradually since crumb absorbency varies.
- Yield and servingServes six. Sweetened cream most likely means lightly sugared pouring cream, though whipped is not ruled out; a vanilla custard sauce suits it equally well.
The Story of Crisco (1913) was a promotional cookbook issued by Procter & Gamble to teach American cooks what to do with hydrogenated cottonseed oil, which had reached the market only two years earlier and had no established place in the kitchen. Its "Calendar of Dinners" assigns a full menu to every day of the year, and this pudding belongs to November 19, when apples were plentiful and cheap from the autumn harvest. The dish itself long predates the book: puddings built on soaked breadcrumbs, eggs and fruit run through English and American cookery for centuries as a way of using stale bread, and the addition of chopped almonds marks it as a slightly dressier version of the everyday form. What the recipe really demonstrates is the book's central argument, that shortening could replace butter or lard anywhere in the household repertoire without anyone noticing.