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November 8
Menu: Cold Corned Beef; Baked Potatoes; Pickled Beets; Cauliflower Salad; Cheese Wafers; Golden Pudding; Coffee Golden Pudding-Line and ornament small pudding dish with puff pastry. Beat 2 tablespoons Crisco with 4 tablespoons sugar till creamy, add 4 tablespoons cakecrumbs, yolks 3 eggs beaten with 1/2 cup milk, 1½ teaspoon salt, grated rind and strained juice 2 oranges. Pour into pudding dish, and bake 40 minutes. Whip up egg whites to stiff froth, stir in 3 tablespoons sugar, few drops yellow color, 1 teaspoon orange extract, and pile on top of pudding. Put back in oven to brown.
A baked orange custard set in a pastry-lined dish and finished with meringue, from the daily menu calendar at the back of Procter & Gamble's 1913 Crisco booklet. The original gives no oven temperature and one measurement that looks like a misprint.
- The salt is almost certainly a typoA teaspoon and a half of salt in a pudding built on three yolks and half a cup of milk would be inedible. Comparable puddings of the period call for a pinch to a quarter teaspoon; treat the printed figure as an error rather than a period preference.
- Oven temperatureNone is given. A custard-based pudding of this kind belongs in a moderate oven, 350F, for the stated 40 minutes; the meringue goes back in at the same heat for 10-15 minutes, or briefly at 400F if you want a darker top and a softer interior.
- CriscoThe book exists to sell it. Crisco in 1913 was hydrogenated cottonseed oil, blander than butter and rather firmer than today's reformulated product; the recipe works with modern shortening, and butter creamed with the sugar gives a better flavour alongside the orange.
- Cake crumbsDry crumbs from a plain sponge or pound cake are what is meant, rather than fresh soft crumb or cookie crumbs. They give the pudding body alongside the yolks, so use crumbs dry enough to swell; stale sponge dried out in a low oven works.
- The pastryRaw puff pastry under a wet custard will steam rather than rise. Line and chill the dish, then blind bake the shell until it is set and lightly coloured before the filling goes in.
- Two orangesOrange size varies enormously, so measure the juice rather than going by count; too much liquid and the custard will be too loose to set.
- Yellow color and orange extractThe dye is cosmetic and can be left out. If you use extract, add it after the sugar is fully beaten in, since alcohol slackens a meringue.
- YieldA "small pudding dish" is not defined; something around a quart, or a 7- to 8-inch dish, suits the quantities. Serves about four, warm rather than hot, so the custard has time to firm.
The Story of Crisco was published by Procter & Gamble in 1913, a year or two after Crisco went on sale, and it is advertising in the shape of a cookbook: an opening essay on the virtues of the new vegetable shortening followed by several hundred recipes in which it replaces butter and lard. The "Calendar of Dinners" at the back assigns a full menu to every day of the year, a common device in household manuals of the era, meant to spare the housekeeper the daily labour of deciding. This November 9 dessert is a standard Anglo-American cabinet or crumb pudding, the kind of thrifty custard that uses up stale cake, dressed for the occasion with orange and a meringue cap.