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October 1
Menu: Veal Cutlets; Rice Croquettes; Lima Beans; Cabbage and Apple Salad; Nut Pudding; Coffee Nut Pudding-1 cup soft breadcrumbs, 2 cups scalded milk, 1 tablespoon Crisco, 1 cup chopped nuts, 1½ teaspoon salt, 2 egg yolks, 3/4 cup sugar, juice and grated rind of 1 lemon, 2 egg whites beaten until stiff, and 2 squares chocolate, melted. Mix breadcrumbs, milk, Crisco, nuts, salt, egg yolks, sugar, chocolate, juice and rind of lemon. When well blended, cut and fold in whites of eggs; pour into Criscoed individual molds, and bake 20 to 30 minutes. Serve hot with cream. Vegetarian
A baked bread-and-custard pudding from the promotional cookbook that introduced Crisco to American kitchens. The original gives no oven temperature and an unusually heavy hand with salt, so read the notes before mixing.
- Oven temperatureNo temperature is given in the recipe. A moderate oven, around 350F, is a reasonable modern reading; setting the molds in a pan of hot water will help the custard set gently rather than curdle at the edges.
- The salt is almost certainly a misprintThe salt looks high -- One and a half teaspoons of salt in a sweet pudding built on two cups of milk will taste noticeably saline, and it may well be a misprint. A quarter to a half teaspoon is closer to what many sweet puddings of the period use; try that and judge for yourself.
- Squares of chocolateA "square" in 1913 means one ounce of unsweetened baking chocolate, so two squares is 2 oz. Semisweet will work but the 3/4 cup of sugar then becomes excessive.
- CriscoAny solid vegetable shortening substitutes directly; so does butter, at the cost of the neutrality the book was advertising. "Criscoed" molds simply means well greased.
- Scalded milkBring the milk just to the point where it steams and shivers at the edge, then pour it over the crumbs and let them swell for a few minutes before the yolks go in. Hot milk tipped straight into yolks and sugar can curdle them.
- Order of mixingMelt the chocolate and combine it with the fat and warm milk mixture before the lemon juice goes in, and add the juice last. Acid poured into hot milk on its own can curdle it.
- Molds and donenessThe recipe specifies only "individual molds"; ramekins or custard cups of roughly 6 oz will do. Twenty to thirty minutes in a moderate oven is realistic: the puddings should be puffed and just set at the center, roughly 170-175F, and they will sink slightly as they cool.
- Yield and servingEnough for about half a dozen small molds, depending on their size. "Serve hot with cream" most likely means plain cream poured over rather than whipped; the pudding is dense and the cold cream sets it off.
The Story of Crisco was published by Procter & Gamble in 1913, two years after the company launched Crisco, a hydrogenated cottonseed-oil shortening sold as a clean, odorless, all-purpose replacement for lard and butter. The recipes were credited to Marion Harris Neil, then a well-known cookery writer. The pudding itself belongs to a much older family: the English bread pudding, in which stale crumbs are swelled in scalded milk and bound with eggs, dressed up here with nuts, chocolate and lemon and baked in individual molds in the fashionable manner of the day.