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November 25
Menu: and let them brown.; Quick Beef Soup; Panned Chicken, Brown Sauce; Curried Rice; Creamed Carrots; Tomato Salad; Baked Macaroni Pudding; Coffee Baked Macaroni Pudding-1 pint milk, 4 long sticks macaroni, 1 egg, 2 tablespoons sugar, nutmeg, 1 tablespoon Crisco, and salt to taste. Break macaroni into ½ inch lengths. Boil milk, shake in macaroni and salt and boil it very slowly for 1½ an hour, or until quite tender, and keep it well stirred during cooking. Thickly Crisco a pudding dish and beat up egg. Add sugar and Crisco to macaroni, let it cool a little, then pour in egg and mix it well. Grate little nutmeg on top and bake pudding very slowly until top is delicately browned. Thanksgiving Dinner
A sweet baked macaroni custard of the rice-pudding family, scaled for a small household. The original gives quantities by "long sticks" and heat by feel, both of which need translating.
- How much macaroni"4 long sticks" means four whole lengths of the old straight macaroni tubes. Their size varied, so no exact modern weight can be recovered; something in the region of 2 oz dry, about 1/2 cup once broken into 1/2-inch pieces, is a reasonable working amount. Any short tubular pasta works; measure by weight rather than trying to match the sticks.
- Crisco and its substitutesCrisco in 1913 was hydrogenated cottonseed oil, sold as an all-purpose replacement for butter and lard. Modern shortening behaves the same way here; unsalted butter gives a better flavor in a sweet pudding, and the tablespoon in the batter is small enough that either choice works.
- "Very slowly" means 300-325F"Very slowly" -- the book gives no temperatures, so this has to be translated by judgement. This is an egg custard and will curdle if pushed; a modern equivalent is roughly 300-325F, checking from about 45 minutes, until the center is just set and a knife comes out clean. At that heat the top browns delicately without the custard weeping.
- The milk is the hingeA pint of milk simmering for an hour and a half will scorch on a direct flame and reduce sharply. Use the lowest heat with a heavy pan, or a double boiler, stir often, and expect to top up with a little more milk if it thickens past a loose porridge before the macaroni is tender.
- Cool before the egg goes in"let it cool a little" is not optional. Adding beaten egg to near-boiling milk and pasta scrambles it on contact; let the mixture drop well below a simmer, or temper the egg with a spoonful of the hot macaroni first.
- Sugar is restrainedTwo tablespoons for a pint of milk is lightly sweet by modern taste, in keeping with a nursery pudding. Three to four tablespoons will suit palates used to a sweeter baked custard.
- YieldA pint of milk with the macaroni will roughly fill a small 1-quart dish and serve two or three; the recipe itself specifies neither. Serve warm; it firms considerably as it cools.
Baked macaroni pudding belongs to the same nineteenth-century British and American family as rice and tapioca pudding: a starch simmered soft in milk, bound with egg, sweetened lightly and finished with grated nutmeg. Macaroni reached English-speaking kitchens as a dry imported good sold in long straight tubes, and it was treated as a sweet milk pudding as well as a savory dish, which is why a cookbook can call for it with sugar and nutmeg and expect no argument. Its appearance here is a matter of publishing rather than tradition: The Story of Crisco (1913) was a promotional cookbook issued after Procter & Gamble introduced Crisco, a hydrogenated cottonseed oil shortening, and its recipes were written to demonstrate that the new fat could stand in for butter and lard in every part of the meal. The "Calendar of Dinners" section supplied a year of menus, so this pudding arrives as the sweet course at the end of one day's dinner, alongside the coffee.