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November 5
Menu: Ham Timbales, Cheese Sauce; Spinach; Paprika Potatoes; Apple and Celery Salad; Cocoanut Pudding; Coffee Cocoanut Pudding-1 cup scalded milk, 3/4 cup soft breadcrumbs, 12 cup grated cocoanut, 2 egg yolks, 1 tablespoon Crisco, 1/2 cup cocoa, 12 cup sugar, 1 teaspoon lemon juice, 2 egg whites, and 1/4 teaspoon salt. Soak bread in scalded milk until soft. Add cocoanut, sugar, cocoa, Crisco, lemon juice and salt; beat well; add yolks eggs beaten, cut and fold in stiffly-beaten whites. Turn into Criscoed pudding dish and bake in moderate oven 30 minutes. Serve hot or cold.
A baked breadcrumb custard from Crisco's day-by-day dinner calendar, dated November 6. It behaves like a soufflé-lite: the beaten whites lift it, the bread holds it.
- The hinge: fold, don't stirOnce the whites go in, cut and fold only until no white streaks remain. Beating them into the crumb base collapses the air and leaves a dense, wet layer at the bottom.
- Moderate ovenRead that as somewhere around 350-375F. Thirty minutes suits a small pudding dish; the pudding is done when the centre is just set and a knife comes out clean.
- Two of the quantities are unclearThe grated cocoanut and the sugar are both printed as "12 cup," which cannot be right. A half cup of each is consistent with the rest of the proportions, but the original figure is not recoverable from the page.
- CocoanutThe period ingredient is fresh grated coconut, unsweetened. Modern sweetened flaked coconut will make the pudding noticeably sweeter; if you use it, cut the sugar back.
- CriscoOne tablespoon of shortening. Any neutral solid fat or an equal amount of butter does the same job here; the quantity is too small to change the texture much. "Criscoed pudding dish" means simply greased.
- Scalded milkRecipes of this period routinely call for milk heated to just below the boil. Hot milk soaks the crumbs faster and better, so it is worth doing.
- YieldA small pudding; three or four servings as written. It sinks a little as it cools, which is normal for a crumb pudding; serve it warm if you want it at its highest.
Procter & Gamble published cookbooks to teach cooks what to do with a wholly new product: hydrogenated cottonseed oil, sold as a shortening that replaced both lard and butter. A day-by-day "Calendar of Dinners" — the organising device of the company's calendar-of-dinners volume — assigned a full menu to each day of the year, so that the fat appeared in a household's cooking as routine rather than novelty, and the brand name is worked into the instructions of the recipes. The pudding itself belongs to an older and thriftier tradition, the baked breadcrumb pudding, which used up stale bread with milk, eggs and whatever flavouring was to hand. Grated coconut was a fashionable addition in American cookery of the period, when whole coconuts and packaged shredded coconut were both becoming widely available.