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October 9
Menu: Roast Shoulder of Veal; Roasted Potatoes; Lima Beans; Pickled Plums; Romaine Salad; Raisin Batter Pudding; Coffee Raisin Batter Pudding-Beat up 3 eggs, sift in 2 cups flour and 14 teaspoon salt, add 1 tablespoon Crisco, 1 cup cream, and beat for 8 minutes; then add 1 teaspoon baking powder and 1 teaspoon orange extract. Pour into a Criscoed casserole, sprinkle over 8 tablespoons sultana raisins, and bake in moderate oven 1 hour. Serve with maple syrup.
A plain baked batter pudding, closer to a sweet Yorkshire pudding than to a cake, leaning on eggs and cream rather than much sugar. It works best served hot from the dish.
- The hinge: do not overfill the dishA batter this eggy climbs the sides as it sets, then falls. Use a dish that the batter fills no more than two-thirds, and do not open the oven during the first half hour.
- "Casserole" hereRead it as a deep ovenproof baking dish; period usage covered both lidded and unlidded vessels. Something around 1.5 quarts suits this quantity. The recipe does not say whether to cover it.
- Moderate ovenThe book gives no temperatures; 'moderate' is conventionally read as roughly 350-375F. An hour at that heat should set the pudding through without hardening the top.
- Salt quantityThe salt figure has lost its fraction in the original line. A quarter teaspoon is the sensible reading for two cups of flour in a sweet pudding.
- Crisco and its substitutesThe single tablespoon of shortening is there for tenderness, not for structure. Melted butter or a neutral oil can stand in, though butter's water and milk solids make it not quite a like-for-like swap; the dish can be greased with either.
- Cream"Cream" in period American recipes was not a standardised product; light cream (about 18-20 percent fat) is a reasonable reading. Heavy cream makes the batter heavier; half-and-half or whole milk makes it leaner but perfectly good.
- Beating timeEight minutes of hand beating works in air and develops some gluten, which a batter pudding depends on. A stand mixer will reach the same smooth, slightly elastic batter in rather less time.
- Baking powder timingIt goes in at the very end, after the long beating, so the gas is not driven off before the dish reaches the oven. Get the batter into the dish and into the oven promptly once it is added.
- Raisins on topSultanas scattered over the surface will sink partway and scorch slightly where exposed. Tossing them in a spoonful of the flour first, or pressing them just under the surface, keeps them from burning.
- YieldSix modest servings. Maple syrup is the given accompaniment and the pudding is barely sweet without it.
This comes from the dinner calendar in The Story of Crisco, the 1913 promotional cookbook Procter & Gamble issued to teach American cooks what to do with a hydrogenated vegetable shortening that had no culinary tradition behind it. The strategy is visible in the recipe itself: an entirely familiar dish, a baked batter pudding of the sort English and American households had made for generations, with a single tablespoon of the new product inserted where butter or lard would have gone, and the brand name turned into a verb for greasing the dish. Sultanas were a common baking raisin of the period, seedless and pale, long associated with Smyrna, and orange extract was one of the cheap bottled flavorings that let a plain flour-and-egg pudding taste of something. Maple syrup as the sauce marks it as an American page rather than an English one.