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November 24
Menu: Cannelon of Beef; Creamed Cabbage Franconia Potatoes; Cranberry Salad; Cheese Wafers; Baba with Syrup; Coffee Baba with Syrup-Sift 3 cups flour and ½ teaspoon salt into a basin, add 1 yeast cake dissolved in 1/2 cup luke warm milk; make well in center of flour, pour in 5 beaten eggs, mix with the hand for 5 minutes. Put it into Criscoed basin, spread over with 1/2 cup Crisco, cover and put in warm place until it has risen to twice its original size. Knead until elastic, add 1 tablespoon sugar, 2 tablespoons currants, 2 tablespoons sultana raisins, knead again. Turn into large Criscoed mold. It should not be more than half full. Allow to rise to top of tin, then bake in moderate oven for 30 minutes. Turn out and pour syrup over it. To make syrup, boil 2 cups water with 1/4 cup sugar for 10 minutes, then add 2 tablespoons apricot jam and boil 5 milk, 1/2 cup cream, 2 well beaten eggs, and pour into prepared pie plate. Bake till firm in moderate oven. Serve hot. As a change, minutes. Strain, add 1 wineglass rum and bring to boiling point. place on the pumpkin pie as it comes out of the oven a layer of halved marshmallows, replace in the oven
The page is a scrambled one — a stray fragment of a custard pie and a marshmallow-topped pumpkin pie has been set into the middle of the baba instructions. Read only the baba and syrup sentences; the words from "5 milk, 1/2 cup cream" through "let them brown" belong to other recipes entirely.
- Where the text breaksThe syrup direction should read: boil 2 cups water with ¼ cup sugar for 10 minutes, add 2 tablespoons apricot jam, boil 5 minutes, strain, add 1 wineglass rum and bring to boiling point. Everything about milk, cream, beaten eggs, pie plate and marshmallows is intrusion from neighbouring entries.
- Yeast cakeOne compressed yeast cake of the period is usually taken as roughly equivalent to one packet of active dry or instant yeast, about 2¼ teaspoons. Dissolve it in milk around 105F; milk much hotter than that will kill the yeast.
- Moderate ovenConventionally read as about 350F. At that heat a large baba mold may well need longer than the stated 30 minutes; test with a skewer, and cover the top loosely if it colours before the centre sets.
- WineglassIn American cookbooks of this era a wineglass is about 2 fluid ounces, ¼ cup. The rum goes in at the end and the syrup is only brought back to boiling point, so a good deal of the alcohol remains.
- CriscoThe half cup spread over the risen dough is shortening used as a soft fat, worked in on the second knead in the manner of a brioche. Butter behaves the same way and tastes better; the book, being Procter & Gamble's, naturally specifies its own product.
- Sultana raisinsSultanas are golden seedless raisins, sold under that name in Britain and Australia and simply as golden raisins in most American stores. The currants are dried Zante currants, not fresh fruit.
- The hingePour the syrup over while the baba is still hot and the syrup near boiling. A cooled cake and a cooled syrup will not absorb; the liquid runs off and pools. Set the turned-out baba in a deep dish and spoon the syrup back over it several times.
- YieldThree cups of flour and five eggs fills a large mold and should serve eight or so. Slice it in wedges and serve with any syrup left in the dish.
The baba is generally traced to Poland and carried into French pastry in the eighteenth century; the rum-soaked version, and later the ring-shaped savarin, became fixtures of the pâtissier's window. The name is usually explained as the Polish and Russian word for an old woman or grandmother, sometimes said to describe the cake's skirted shape. Its appearance in Procter & Gamble's Crisco cookery is telling: the promotional books set out to prove that a newly hydrogenated vegetable shortening could stand in for butter and lard anywhere at all, and an enriched yeast dough of the brioche family was about the most demanding test a home baker was likely to attempt. The "Calendar of Dinners" arrangement, running day by day through the year, was designed to answer the perpetual question of what to cook while quietly ensuring the tin was needed again tomorrow.